


esperance delta

by leoandsnake



Series: un jour je serai de retour [7]
Category: Disco Elysium (Video Game)
Genre: Anal Sex, Case Fic, M/M, Oral Sex, art museum date, canon-typical grotesqueries about a dead body, cops doing boring paperwork, exes trying to make it work, harry genuinely trying to remain sober, harry kim and jean have a movie night, harry trying to solve the many mysteries of kim, new harry doing psychic battle with the ghost of pre-martinaise harry that is haunting his brain, poppers, precinct 41 dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 13:34:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29717958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leoandsnake/pseuds/leoandsnake
Summary: Jean’s breaths are even shallower, now. He leans down, his elbows on his knees, his head hanging low. “I don’t know,” he says, his voice a low rumble. “I really don’t know. I can’t let you go, I don’t even know who I am without you. I don’t know what the fuck my life is without you in it. Okay?”“But I make you miserable,” Harry says.“It’s always been my hope that one day you would stop doing that.”
Relationships: Harry Du Bois & Kim Kitsuragi & Jean Vicquemare, Harry Du Bois/Jean Vicquemare
Series: un jour je serai de retour [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2095374
Comments: 12
Kudos: 33





	esperance delta

In the end, the Claire brothers go quietly, as they had agreed.

The arrests occur simultaneously. Lieutenant Feuerbach leads several B-Wing officers in the arrest of Edgar at his accountant’s office in La Delta (as the B-Wing, Jean explained, busts financial crimes, and jurisdictional trespasses into La Delta are _their_ territory) while across the river, Jean, Harry and Kim escort Evrart out of the harbor in handcuffs.

Evrart doesn’t resist them at all, although he does walk a little slower than Harry thinks is necessary. He could tell as soon as Evrart got up that he’s more mobile than he had previously claimed to be.

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: There’s something downright _sprightly_ about him, for a man that size.

As they walk down the road toward the waiting paddywagon, the people of Martinaise step out of doorways and onto balconies, watching. Titus leads a group of Union men out of the Whirling, and they stand about ten feet back from the wagon, their hats held to their chests like they’re watching a funeral procession.

Lizzy is among them. She doesn’t have a hat to hold to her chest, but she does glare — at Harry specifically.

EMPATHY: She doesn't like you at all. You are _everything_ she doesn’t like.

“Are they kidding with this shit?” Jean says in an undertone as he takes stock of the scene. “They’re acting like we’re taking him to the chair.”

“They mean well,” Evrart says. “Loyalty is a good quality, Mr. Vicquemare... you’re loyal yourself, aren’t you? It’s not a weakness.”

“ _Officer_ Vicquemare,” Jean snaps. He puts his hand against Evrart’s back and shoves him along.

Judit and Sundance brought the paddywagon, and they’re the ones to drive off with Evrart while Kim, Jean and Harry follow along in Kim’s MC. Harry refuses to sit in the back seat again, so he debases himself by running out in front of Jean and diving for the passenger side door like a madman. After he’s scrambled in and is sitting there very pleased with himself, he looks up through the windscreen and spots Kim and Jean exchanging an amused look.

“Hello, detective,” Kim says mildly as he gets into the driver’s seat.

“Hi,” Harry says, shooting him a grin.

Kim starts up the engine with a defeaning whine that settles into a purr, then eases the MC back onto the road heading south, following the paddywagon as it lurches along.

INLAND EMPIRE: Back toward home, where you’re treated as an authority, at least by people who don’t know what a raging alcoholic mess you are. So… only civilians, not your compatriots.

EMPATHY: Kim knows you’re a raging alcoholic mess, and he respects you.

AUTHORITY: But he does not treat you as an authority, he treats you as an equal. The double-yefreitor part of your title might as well be a prize you won playing a boardwalk arcade game, for all the good it’s been doing you.

Harry realizes that Jean is saying his name, and turns to him.

“Hand me the radio?” Jean says, extending his hand. “I need to call in.”

“I can call in,” Harry offers.

“No, I’ll do it,” Jean says, wiggling his fingers.

Harry passes the microphone to him, then stares out the window as they zoom toward the drawbridge, heading toward the motorway, which towers on concrete stilts over Jamrock.

“Hi Jules,” Jean says, when Jules picks up. “This is Vicquemare.”

“Hello Satellite-Officer Vicquemare, what’s your status?”

“Heading back toward the station with Lieutenants Kitsuragi and Du Bois,” Jean says. “Rearguard to Officers Minot and Fischer as they transport Evrart Claire. ETA twenty minutes. Do I have any messages?”

“Yes,” Jules says. “The Inspectorate General called, asking for reports from the three of you on the recent discharges of your service weapons.”

“I didn’t discharge my weapon,” Harry calls over his shoulder. “I set a guy on fire.”

There’s a beat of baffled silence from Jules, who finally says, “They’d like your notes on that, regardless.”

“I don’t _have_ any notes,” Harry whispers to Kim.

“I made pretty extensive notes on the tribunal while you were recovering from being shot,” Kim says in an undertone. “You can crib something from what I wrote.”

“10-4, Jules,” Jean says. “Anything else?”

“Yes, Captain Pryce requests your presence in his office once you’re back.”

“All three of us?”

“Correct.”

“Okay,” Jean says. “Is that it?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks. See you in twenty.”

“Roger.”

Jean leans forward to pass the microphone back to Harry, who hangs it up. The three of them sit in silence as they crawl up the on-ramp to the 8/81; Kim is drumming his fingers on his steering wheel.

EMPATHY: He doesn’t like inching along behind this slow paddywagon. He wants to drive about 20 km/h faster than this, and he wants to be able to change lanes freely, zipping in and out of this slow-ass commuter traffic.

“Why does Pryce want to see us?” Harry says, to no one in particular. “Are we in trouble?”

“It depends,” Kim says.

“On what?”

“On whatever the Coalition is up to,” Kim says. “Which is, overall, currently unknown.”

“Why are we at the mercy of that, anyway?” Harry says.

“That’s the system,” Jean says from the backseat.

“System sucks,” Harry says.

“It’s the one we have,” Kim says simply.

/

It’s mid-morning by the time they get back to the 41st. As the sun crests its peak, golden light engulfs Couron, turning its skyscrapers into eerie mirrors that reflect a shimmering version of the sky around them. It’s a warm day, and Jamrock is raucous with life. Harry people-watches out of his open window as they coast to a stop outside of the Precinct 41 garages.

Kim pulls into an open spot, and they all hop out. Something about being back in Jamrock is putting Harry ill at ease, like taking a boat to sea with a bad storm on the horizon.

As they pass the stall Captain Pryce’s horse is in, close to the entrance of the precinct, the horse whickers at them. Jean stops and digs around in one of his pockets, unearthing a hard candy, which he unwraps. He sticks his hand through the stall’s bars and offers it to the horse, who takes it.

“What was that?” Harry says.

“A peppermint,” Jean says, and motions for them to keep going.

They do, with Harry and Kim walking side-by-side toward the front doors. Kim shoots a sidelong glance at Harry, his expression unreadable.

EMPATHY: He thinks it’s fucked up that you took Jean’s horse away to replace the horses with MCs, and then crashed your MC into the sea.

REACTION SPEED: I thought Kim was supposed to be _our_ friend. What’s the point of a friend if they don’t take your side when you do asshole shit?

VOLITION: That is actually not the point of a friend.

Harry is distracted as he pushes through the main doors of the station, by a lot of things — his thoughts, the ache in his thigh, the lingering discomfort from his black eye, the spiderwebbed inputs of the city around him draping over his brain and clinging to it. He’s jarred from all this when their entrance is met by a crowd of cops who are cheering and applauding.

He stops, stunned, and Kim stops beside him, seeming equally stunned. Only Jean appears unfazed.

“Get back to work,” he calls over the din.

Chad shouts, “Three clearances!” then holds up three fingers on each hand and wiggles them. Everyone starts following suit; it’s a sea of wiggling fingers, like worms on fish hooks.

“The union busters,” Mack says, saluting them with his three fingers. “Destroyers of socialism. Heroes of industry.”

“Stop it,” Jean says, laughing. “Go back to work, Torson.”

“Who punched DB in the face?” Emil Mollins says, pointing at Harry.

“Union guy,” Jean says.

“What’d you do to him?” Chad says to Harry.

“Nothing!” Harry says, offended. “It was an accident, he meant to punch a different cop.”

“Why were you all waiting for us?” Jean says.

“We weren’t,” Chester says. “We were waiting for Minot and Fischer, they got back like two minutes before you guys did. But your guy wouldn’t fit in the normal elevator, so they had to take him to holding with the freight elevator, and we missed that, so we wanted to celebrate _something_.”

Jean flicks his hand at him. “Alright, we’ve celebrated. Everyone back to work.”

Trant makes his way through the crowd, deftly avoiding the raucous C-Wing cops as they disperse from their thicket by the main entrance and start drifting deeper into the bullpen, bringing their chaos with them as they go.

“Where have you been?” Jean says to Trant when he stops in front of them. “I put, like, six calls in for you when I was in Martinaise.”

He shrugs. “We kept missing each other. I have a lot of things to discuss with you, though.” He turns to Harry. “Harry, how’s your brain?”

“It’s in my head,” Harry says.

Trant laughs at this, despite it not being a joke. “Excellent. We should talk some more, when you have the chance. I’d like to hear more about the night leading up to you losing your memory.”

“Well, he doesn’t remember it,” Kim says, with sly humor.

“What he’s heard secondhand, I mean,” Trant adds.

“That’s very low on our list of priorities,” Jean says. He starts walking, beckoning them along with him.

They make their way through an orderly grid of wood desks, all covered in paperwork and old cups of coffee, some illuminated by green banker’s lamps. Only half of the desks are occupied, and at each one of those, a cop is working, sleeping, or talking to a nearby cop. The din of the bullpen is overwhelming, but comforting.

INLAND EMPIRE: This is the sound of home.

Finally, Jean stops next to an empty desk and points to the one adjacent to it, which is covered in paperwork and empty coffee cups. “That’s yours,” he says to Harry. He points to the desk in front of Harry’s. “That’s yours, Lieutenant Kitsuragi. I asked the captain to keep you close, if he could, so I think he moved Nick Munro, which is fine, because Nick doesn’t like Harry.”

“What did I do to him?” Harry says.

“Surprisingly, nothing,” Jean says. “He’s just never liked you.”

“Munro hates disco,” calls a middle-aged female cop with a smoker’s voice who’s sitting at an adjacent desk, cradling a phone to her shoulder as if on hold with someone. “He thinks you’re a disco douchebag, lieutenant.”

Harry is stunned by the unfairness of this. “But disco is all we _have_.”

The smoker-voiced cop nods in understanding.

“Harry, this is Sergeant Maura Rolloff,” Jean says, indicating her. “She used to be on the task force… she was actually the first one to _leave_ the task force.”

“Not because you’re a crazy drunk, DB,” Maura assures Harry. “I’d been waiting for an opening in B-Wing for a long time, so when one came up, I jumped. I just love financial crimes.”

ESPRIT DE CORPS: She's unfazed by being introduced to you despite having known you for nearly a decade. The news of your amnesia has spread far and wide.

“Don’t we all,” says Kim. He offers his hand to her. “Hi. Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi.”

“Oh, you’re our Precinct 57 guy!” Maura exclaims, shifting the phone so she can shake his hand. “Welcome.”

Kim thanks her, then sets his blue notebook down on the desk and takes stock of it. He opens the drawers as if to make sure they’re empty, and looks pleased when he sees that they are.

Jean turns to Trant, who’s been standing completely still beside him for the last minute or so. “Trant, will you be around at…” He pushes up his sleeve to check his watch. “Twelve-thirty?”

“I can be,” Trant says with a nod.

“Good, because I want to talk to the entire task force, including you.”

Kim looks at Jean, suddenly alert.

“Great,” Trant says, clapping his hands together. “I’m going to go get some coffee in the meantime. Would any of you like anything?”

“Not for me,” Kim says.

Harry opens his mouth to answer that yes, he would like a coffee and a donut, but Jean replies for him with: “We’re good. Thanks.”

ENDURANCE: This guy thinks he’s your fucking _wife!_

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: Neither a coffee nor a donut would help your current cardiac situation. Jean did you a favor.

When Trant is gone, Kim says to Jean, “Something we should know about?”

EMPATHY: His tone is light, but a little clipped.

AUTHORITY: He’s not going to pull rank on Jean, but this is as close as he’ll get to doing so.

“Yes,” Jean says. He takes a seat at his own desk and lights a cigarette.

Harry follows suit, sitting in the battered, careworn leather rolly chair behind his document-covered desk. There is not a single inch of this desk that isn’t covered in paperwork. It’s a demoralizing sight.

Jean exhales smoke and says to Kim, “Sorry, lieutenant, I’m not trying to step on your dick. I’m just used to taking the lead with the task force, and I’m anticipating…” He twirls his finger in the air, pointing it slightly. “Interference.”

VISUAL CALCULUS: Gesturing in the direction of Pryce’s office.

“You want to circle the wagons,” Kim says, in a tone low enough that their neighbors wouldn’t be able to hear it. “Get the task force on our side before the brass can get to them.”

Jean nods.

Harry can’t stop staring at the mountain of papers on his desk. “When’s the last time I did paperwork?” he says to Jean.

“Months ago,” Jean says.

Kim’s eyebrows shoot up at this, but he doesn’t otherwise react. “Are we going upstairs now, then?” he says. Unlike them, he hasn’t sat down yet, but he does lean on the edge of his new desk. “Get it out of the way?”

Jean blows out more smoke and nods again. “I’m just taking the edge off before we do.”

“What about my edge?” Harry says. “I have edge, too, how come I never get an edge break?”

“You’ve taken all your edge off,” Jean snaps at him. “You’re a circle. You took so much edge off that you totaled your brain.”

Harry gives him a pitiful look, and Jean hands him the cigarette with obvious annoyance. Harry takes a few grateful drags and hands it back.

“I have things I’d like to say before we _do_ go up,” Jean says, “but the bullpen… it’s like Martinaise. Ears everywhere.” He takes a decisive final drag off his cigarette and stubs it out in the ashtray on his desk. “Shall we?”

“Yes,” Kim says, rising from his lean with the energy of a coiled spring.

LOGIC: He’s antsy to get this out of the way.

As they ascend the stairs to the upper deck where the captains’ offices and conference rooms are, Harry looks out over the bullpen. Most of the cops aren’t paying attention to him, but a few are; when Harry catches their eyes, they look away.

Jean knocks on Pryce’s door when they reach it, and from inside, they hear him call, “Come in.”

In front of Pryce’s desk are three chairs arranged in a semicircle; the lights are dimmed to a milky softness, and Pryce is smoking a cigar. “Sit,” he says to no one in particular, and once all three of them have sat, he holds out three cigars like a hand of cards.

Harry takes one immediately, as does Jean. Kim demurs.

“What, you don’t smoke?” Pryce says to him, like this is evidence of criminal insanity.

Kim hesitates, then takes the last one.

EMPATHY: He thinks cigars are disgusting, and this fucks up his nightly cigarette ritual, but he’s willing to play ball with the boss.

Jean lights his cigar and hands his lighter to Harry, who follows suit and hands it to Kim. The air fills with acrid cigar smoke that leaves a bitter film in the back of Harry’s throat.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Hallmark of a cheap cigar.

Harry blows rings of smoke at the ceiling. He didn’t realize he knew how to do that, but there they are: perfect rings.

“So,” Pryce says, talking around the cigar in his mouth. He puts his hands on his desk, the fingers laced together, and leans forward. “Three clearances! Good work, gentlemen.”

“Thank you,” Harry says, blowing more smoke rings.

Pryce smiles at him, his eyes twinkling. “How are you, DB? You remember anything?”

“Enough,” Harry says evasively.

“Enough! Well, hey, what more can we ask for.” Pryce clears his throat, and his gaze lights on Kim, who’s only taken one puff of his cigar so far. “Kitsuragi, what say you?”

“Sir?” Kim says.

Pryce’s twinkling eyes take on a sinister glitter. “I know where these two stand, politically,” he says. “I don’t know about you.”

Harry coughs in the middle of a smoke ring. “You know where I stand politically, sir? _I_ don’t even know where I stand politically.”

“Well,” Pryce says, “I don’t know how you feel about economics, or democracy, or any of that, but I know how you feel about the Coalition.”

Harry turns to Jean, who smokes his cigar and doesn’t meet Harry’s gaze.

“How do I feel about the Coalition?” he says. “You didn’t tell me.”

“I didn’t want to impose your previous viewpoint on you,” Jean says, shrugging.

“How do I feel, Jean?”

“You don’t like it,” Jean says. Their eyes finally meet, and Harry’s heart skips a beat when they do. “You don’t like the MI, you resent its involvement with the RCM.”

Harry turns back to Pryce, who inclines his head in a nod.

“How does Jean feel?” Harry says to Pryce.

“Similarly to you,” Pryce says. “Standard sentiment, in our brotherhood.”

He looks to Kim, who takes a drag from his cigar.

EMPATHY: He masterfully hides the disgust he feels at the taste.

Kim exhales smoke and remains quiet for a few beats before saying, “I don’t think my feelings about the Coalition are relevant to my police work.”

REACTION SPEED: He used to consider himself a moralist — why isn’t he telling Pryce that?

LOGIC: Because he’s right, it doesn’t matter.

AUTHORITY: No, it _shouldn’t_ matter. But it _does_ matter.

“Well, _I_ think it’s relevant,” Pryce says, his cigar wagging. “At least when it comes to this case.”

“We cleared the case,” Kim says, lowering his head, the light coming in the window catching on his glasses and making them shine white. “We made three arrests. In fact, we manipulated the situation cleverly enough that we were able to convince all three of our suspects to turn themselves in.”

“A gamble,” Pryce says.

“Yes,” Kim agrees. “A big gamble, but one that paid off.”

Pryce nods. A silence stretches out between the four of them. They smoke their cigars in silent contemplation.

“I wonder if it would be fair,” Pryce says, “for me to ask you gentlemen to divest yourself from issues concerning Martinaise, going forward. We need Major Crimes in general to divest, actually.”

“Sir?” Jean says, sounding startled.

“ _Everything_ in Martinaise?” Harry says. He’s engulfed in dismay. “Even the phasmid? Even the dance club? Even Cuno?”

“Fuck Cuno,” Jean says, “what about the drug smuggling operation? Drugs are being run through Terminal B into Jamrock, Captain.”

“Everything,” Pryce says. “This is at the request of MI.” He chews on the end of his cigar. “A-Wing is going to take the drug case, I just talked to McCoy about it. Everything else is going to the 57th.”

Kim lets out a sigh.

“I’m sorry, boys. They seem to think that you went down there and got taken in by the Union… swayed to sympathize with them. I’m hard-pressed to argue.”

“We don’t sympathize with the Union,” Kim says, his voice low but firm. “We did what was best for both the RCM and the people of Martinaise. We did our jobs, and we did them well, sir.”

Pryce nods some more. The deep groove between his furry eyebrows deepens further. “I do get it,” he says. “I do. But the Coalition is our single biggest donor, and I can’t fuck with the financials on this one. This is coming from way over my head… MI down to the préfet de police down to me. Look, you did great work on this case, and I’m sorry to have to hamstring you like this, but…” He spreads his hands. “Sometimes these things are out of our hands. We never wanted Martinaise, anyway. We won our little skirmish with the 57th, picked up Kitsuragi, got our clearances — I’d call this a win and move on.”

The three of them sit there in stunned silence.

“Well,” Pryce says, picking up a fat ballpoint pen from his desk and starting to make notes in a ledger he has open, “that’s it, that was all. Back to work.”

Jean gets up first, swiping at his nose with the tip of his thumb. Kim follows, and Harry traipses after them like he’s their dog, pulling Pryce’s door shut behind him.

“What the _fuck_?” Jean mouths at Kim.

Kim shakes his head and shrugs.

“They don’t want us _in Martinaise?”_ Jean says in a whisper so quiet it’s barely audible. _“Ever again?”_

“And they’re jamming Soona,” Kim murmurs. “It’s incredibly suspicious.”

“You guys think this is about the pale?” Harry says. He’s doing his best to keep his voice low, but Jean shushes him anyway. “Does that mean I get to tell the task force about my theory?”

“Oh, Trant will _love_ your pale theory,” Jean says drily. He glances around. “We shouldn’t talk about this where people can hear us.”

“Talking about sensitive topics where people can hear us seems to be our long suit,” Kim says humorously. “But no, detective, it’s not just about the pale… it’s bigger than that.”

“How big?” Harry says.

“Bigger than us,” says Jean.

/

Once he’s back at his desk, Jean sets to writing at length in a notebook, and quickly gets so absorbed that he barely even looks up when Harry pesters him for attention. So Harry decides to just follow Kim around — first while he goes to the break room to get coffee, and then to Human Resources for onboarding activities, and then to the restroom.

“Detective,” Kim says at this last juncture, turning around as they’re walking by a row of chipped, forlorn-looking sinks, “you don’t have to follow me _everywhere_.”

“I actually do have to pee,” Harry says quickly.

“Fine.”

Kim goes over to a urinal, and Harry takes the one beside him; while they’re undoing their belts and unzipping their flies, a toilet flushes, and a cop comes out of the stall, then leaves without washing his hands. When the door shuts behind him, Kim makes a face.

“Maybe cops don’t wash their hands,” Harry says.

“Cops wash their hands,” Kim says, in a forceful way that makes it clear this is a matter of settled debate.

Harry goes about his business, then, taking his dick out. As soon as he does, it occurs to him that Kim’s seen his, but he hasn’t seen Kim’s, and his gaze immediately snaps to Kim’s crotch.

“What are you doing?” Kim demands, whipping his hips to the left to keep his modesty.

“Come on, man, you’ve seen mine,” Harry says. “I just want us to be even.”

“No.”

“It’s not fair, Kim! Look, I have mine in my hand, we’re on equal footing, here. Just let me look at yours.”

Kim doesn’t turn back toward him. “I didn’t _look_ at yours. I didn’t want to see it. I was changing your clothes. It was purely professional… medical, even.”

“I don’t think you needed to take my drawers off just to change my clothes,” Harry counters. “I think you wanted to sneak a peek at my rig, see what I’m working with.”

Kim shoots Harry a glance over his shoulder. “Your underwear was soaked in blood, it had crusted to your skin. You would have gotten bed sores if I had left it on you.”

“Oh,” Harry says. He’s quiet for a beat. “Was it bad, when I got shot? Like, was it scary for you?”

“Yes,” Kim says simply. “But I’m a professional, and I knew what to do. And you pulled through.”

Harry nods, then tries to lean in to see over Kim’s shoulder.

Kim blocks him bodily, slamming his shoulder into Harry’s. “Harry! Maybe you _are_ a workplace sexual harasser, come to think of it!”

“Come on, Kim, I’m down bad,” Harry pleads with him. “I’m having a real masculinity crisis, look at me… I cry during sex, apparently, I’ve been getting over the same breakup for the last six years, I fuck guys in the ass, I have like ten bucks in the bank. You thought I was sixty, my boss thinks I have soup for brains. It’s a sad state of affairs, and you saw my dick, so just please let me see yours.”

Kim’s shoulders shake a little.

EMPATHY: He’s stifling a laugh.

RHETORIC: Miraculously, this spiel is actually appealing to the part of him that sympathizes with you.

“Fine,” Kim says, and turns around, throwing his hands in the air.

Harry looks at his dick. Very serviceable. A standard-issue sidearm; Kim-like.

“Thank you,” Harry says, looking Kim in the eyes as he says it, to be polite.

Kim sighs and nods. “Can I piss now?”

“Yes, lieutenant.”

/

Around noon, Harry leaves the precinct to get a kebab from the little kebab cart that seems to be parked eternally on the street below the station. He stands in the middle of the filthy sidewalk and eats it, the 8/81 towering over his head, traffic roaring.

He’s about to head back up when someone claps him on the back. Harry turns around and sees another cop. His craggily handsome face is very familiar, but his identity doesn’t immediately come to mind.

ESPRIT DE CORPS: He’s a fellow lieutenant.

LOGIC: How do you know that?

ESPRIT DE CORPS: I just do.

“McCoy?” Harry says, guessing wildly.

A smile splits McCoy’s face. “DB! So you can’t be completely out of your gourd, huh?”

“I’m somewhat inside my gourd,” Harry says. “Half in and half out of my gourd.”

ENCYCLOPEDIA: McCoy is an A-Wing lieutenant. That’s vice, and, like Pryce said earlier, narcotics.

McCoy claps him on the back some more, then grabs him around the back of the neck and steers him toward the line for the kebab cart, which is about 12 people deep — half other cops and half working stiffs. “Hang out with me for a sec while I grab lunch,” he says.

Harry nods in agreement.

DRAMA: There’s something off about this guy and how he’s talking to you, sire.

AUTHORITY: He’s manipulative, that’s what’s off.

EMPATHY: His jocular friendliness is a front, the same way that Jean’s exasperation with you is a front. Masking the opposite emotions — Jean is masking love, McCoy is masking an indifference that borders on hostility.

VOLITION: Be careful.

“So,” McCoy says in a low voice, “what the fuck went down in Martinaise?”

Harry plays dumb. “What do you mean?”

“I mean…” McCoy reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes, offering one to Harry. Harry takes it, and McCoy lights his own, then passes the lighter. Harry lights it; the tobacco smell mixes in his nose with the rancid smell of the kebab cart’s generator churning out pollution, the city’s sewer, and the acrid tang of fuel oil coming from the overhead traffic. “Shit got a little crazy, right? You killed a couple guys, busted the Union…”

“We didn’t bust the Union,” Harry says.

He wants to add ‘we prevented the Union from being busted, actually’, but —

VOLITION: What did I just say? What did I _just_ tell you?

Harry shuts up.

“Right, right, but you fucked them,” McCoy says jovially. The line moves up, and he moves up with it, easily pulling Harry along with him. They’re the same height, and he’s in better shape. “Anyway — and before that, you were on, like, a suicidal bender? Crashed your MC?”

“All true,” Harry says.

“Lordy,” McCoy says, and whistles.

A sound comes from the west; the echo of distant gunshots. _Pop pop._ Harry jerks in surprise, turning his head in that direction. No one else reacts.

“Were those gunshots?” he says.

“Happens all the time around here, they’ll call us if they need us,” McCoy says, smoking his cigarette. “No, I’m just wondering, y’know… Pryce seems all agitated about this, which is weird, ‘cos it’s _Martinaise…_ and Vic never talks to me about anything, you know he doesn’t like me. So I thought you and I could talk.”

“We can talk,” Harry says nervously, slithering out from under McCoy’s grip. “Anytime. Except for right now, because I have to go upstairs and, uh, have a task force meeting. But I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah, we’ll talk later,” McCoy says, winking at him as he walks away.

COMPOSURE: Did you fuck this guy or something?

CONCEPTUALIZATION: No, that’s not what the deal is. It’s something more sinister than that.

Harry hurries back into the station, heading through the lower entrance and passing through the damp, eerie, checker-tiled basement, where the lazareth and the morgue are. He heads up the stairs to the main floor, then up the stairs again to the catwalk, and ducks into conference room B, where Kim and Jean already are.

They’re sitting at the head of the table, going through papers; they look up when Harry comes through the door.

“Where have you been?” Jean says.

“Getting lunch,” Harry says, coming over and collapsing into the seat nearest them. “What, do you guys not eat?”

Kim points to a sandwich wrapper lying on the table in front of him.

VISUAL CALCULUS: There was once a sandwich there. He has since eaten it.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: And Jean smokes more than he eats, at least during the day.

“Fair enough,” Harry says. He gazes out the conference room window, which overlooks the drab rooftop of the squat brick firehouse across the street, and takes a drag off the cigarette. “Hey, Jean? What’s my deal with McCoy?”

Jean glances up from the papers he’s flipping through. “Hmm?”

“I get a weird vibe from him.”

“Do you,” Jean says. It’s not a question, it’s a statement, delivered in his husky growl.

Harry would like to hear the husky growl in his ear again; the mere thought of it makes a pleasant chill wriggle up his spine and into his brainstem. He wants to suck Jean’s dick — something he hasn’t done yet, due to his bruised cheekbone. He wonders if Jean will let him sleep over at his place, tonight.

Harry did do some cleaning in his own apartment before leaving for Martinaise, i.e., collect up all of the empty bottles and turn them in at the local Frittte (receiving ✤6.80 for his efforts), but somehow that apartment still feels like the mouth of hell itself. Everything about it has the taint of evil; the way the refrigerator reeks when opened even though it’s completely empty of food, the eerie squeak the kitchen sink makes when he turns the faucet, the claustrophobia of its dark walls and light flooring.

It’s the Sad, he knows. The Sad has not yet destroyed Jean’s apartment, though there are flecks of it in his bedroom, like the 2mm of pale in the church. It lurks in the clothes on his floor, in the cups on his tables.

Harry wonders if the purpose of Jean’s houseplants is to keep the Sad at bay.

LOGIC: Oh, fuck, is that why Kim has hobbies? Is _that_ what hobbies are for? Is _everyone_ constantly on the brink of Sad?

VOLITION: Yes.

The conference room door opens. Harry turns and sees Chester walk in.

“Guess what Harry just asked me?” Jean says to Chester, as he takes a seat a few chairs down from Harry.

“What, how to spell his own name?” Chester says.

“No,” Jean says, laughing, while Harry glares unhappily at Chester. “He asked what his deal with McCoy is.”

“Ohh,” Chester says. “What, does he not remember the _incident_?”

Harry looks back at Jean. Kim is now also looking at Jean, peeking sidelong at him.

“Yeah, obviously I don’t remember whatever ‘the incident’ is,” Harry says, with generous air quotes. “What is it?”

“We don’t have to get into this at work,” Jean tells him. His voice is more kind, suddenly — more sincere.

“Why, is it humiliating?”

“No, it’s just personal.”

“Well, if you and McLaine both know, then I wanna know,” Harry says. “And Kim can know, I have no secrets from Kim.”

He winks at Kim in reference to their earlier moment of genital intimacy. Kim looks like he doesn’t know how to feel about this.

EMPATHY: He’s thinking it would be fine if you kept some secrets from him.

“Okay, fine,” Jean says, with a resigned little eyeroll that Harry finds sexy on an instinctive, gut level, for some reason. He gets the feeling that Jean used to do the resigned little eyeroll when Harry would hit on him at work. “About a year ago, you brought some woman to one of McCoy’s parties.”

“Tina,” Chester says.

RHETORIC: The way he draws out the name _Tina_ makes it clear that Tina was objectively sexy. _Teeeeena_.

“Yeah, whoever,” Jean says, with a flick of his hand. (DRAMA: Jealous.) “Anyway, I think you had literally just found her at a bar before you got there. You were both piss drunk.”

“What were you doing?” Harry says to him.

“What was _I_ doing?” Jean says, looking baffled. “I was talking to people, and keeping an eye on you in case you opened fire or tried to jump off a balcony or something. Anyway, I didn’t see exactly what happened, but I think you went to take a leak, and McCoy started talking to Tina. They hit it off, I guess. McCoy was also piss drunk.”

INLAND EMPIRE: There is some kind of dark emotional miasma associated with what Jean is saying. Betrayal… boiling rage.

“They started making out,” Jean says. “You came back and saw this. You were furious. You grabbed McCoy’s coffee maker, threw it through his kitchen window, and called him a ‘filthy motherless whoreson’. Then you stormed out.”

“Massive party foul,” Chester says. “Destroyed the vibe. Very hard to come back from that.”

Harry sits with this information for a moment. “So I don’t like McCoy?”

“I wouldn’t say _that_ ,” Jean says. “That was just the official end of the lieutenant pussyhounds squad… and McCoy held it against you for a long time. Understandably, since you never offered to replace either the window or the coffeemaker.”

Kim is sitting there in silent contemplation, taking all of this in.

“He was nice to me just now,” Harry says. “But I kind of got the feeling he was pumping me for information.”

“Did you give him any?” Jean says, his brow knitting.

“No, I blew him off.”

“Okay, good,” Jean says. “That’s not McCoy-specific, either…” He glances at Chester. “What we’re about to talk about in here doesn’t leave this room, okay? This is task force shit, eyes only.”

“Ooh,” Chester says in a goofy voice. “Are we secret agents now, Vic?”

“No, and fuck you,” Jean says mildly. “If you and Torson don’t take this seriously, you’re out, and the lieutenants are gonna advise Pryce to send you both to work the fucking marine unit for a few months.”

Chester puts his hands in the air. “I’ll be good.”

“Good,” Jean says, and checks his watch, then checks it against the clock on the wall. “It’s twelve thirty, where is everyone?”

“Mack is smoking,” Chester says.

“I saw Fischer and Pantoffel in the kebab line just now,” Harry adds. “What’s the marine unit do?”

“Pulls bodies out of the Esperance,” Kim and Jean reply in unison, and then glance at each other and laugh.

The door to the conference room opens again, and Judit, Mack and Trant enter, taking seats at the opposite side of the table from Harry. Everyone exchanges perfunctory hellos and ‘how are you’s. Mack flicks a folded-up paper straw at Chester, who picks it up and throws it back at him.

One of the ‘how are you’s comes from Judit to Harry, who blinks at her in surprise. There’s a kindness in her voice that, for some reason, makes his throat swell with repressed tears.

He can’t honestly say he’s fine, because his leg hurts, and his face and head hurt, and his throat and chest are burning from whatever esophageal havoc that his drug and alcohol abuse have wrought, and he’s stalked by crushing existential dread.

“Better,” Harry says, because _that’s_ true. He is better. He’s no longer as sick and clammy as he was a few days ago; the immediate body blow of sobering up after a long bender has receded, though his raging desire to drink remains.

And the nightmares have been better. Sleeping in bed with Jean has helped. Clinging to the heat of a familiar person seems to prevent, or at least abate, his nightly slide into the abyss.

Judit’s lips twitch up in a small smile.

Maggie and Sundance enter, then, and Jean says to Sundance, “Lock that behind you.”

Sundance complies, and the two of them sit, filling in the remaining chairs. Once they’re all seated and settled, everyone looks to Kim and Jean.

Jean rests his fingertips against the table in front of him. “So,” he says. “The task force has been taken off of all Martinaise-related issues. Permanently.”

“What, are you fucking kidding?” Sundance blurts out. “Just when that place finally gets interesting, we get benched? Why?”

“I’m guessing it’s DB’s fault,” Chester says.

“It’s not,” Jean says, flicking his gaze to Chester. “It’s no one’s fault. It’s interference from the MI.”

Everyone looks surprised, save Judit and Trant. Jean must have discussed this with them already.

“ _Continued_ interference,” Kim adds. “They’ve been interfering ever since we arrested Dros, with the goal of busting the Union, to dispel the unrest in the region.”

“We outmaneuvered them,” Jean says. “We made sure the Union would have continuity of power, even after we arrested the Claires. We avoided creating a power vacuum… which is what the Coalition was counting on us to create.”

“So the Coalition is leaning on our superiors in order to keep us out of Martinaise,” Kim says.

Harry feels like he should add something, so he says, “On all issues. Including the drug trafficking, and the phasmid, and the speck of pale that’s going to swallow Revachol.”

At this, everyone besides Kim and Jean looks around like, _huh?_

AUTHORITY: You could have stopped after drug trafficking.

“The what that’s going to do what?” Mack says, sounding alarmed.

“This has to do with his theory,” Jean says to Trant. “The one I was telling you about.”

“Oh, about the pale!” Trant says. “I actually thought that was ingenious.”

Harry winks at him. Trant looks taken aback, but winks in reply.

“Don’t get us off track,” Jean says to Harry, then continues: “The drug trafficking investigation has been given to A-Wing.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Chester says.

“Yeah, that’s a Major Crimes case if I’ve ever seen one,” Sundance adds, twirling back and forth in his chair. “Massive drug trafficking operation linked to fucking La Puta _Madre_? The narcos have their hands full with street rips, they don’t have time for something like this.”

Jean nods. “Lieutenant Kitsuragi, Lieutenant-Yefreitor Du Bois and I agree that this is bullshit,” he says. “We’re being punished for good policework, and the captain has no choice in doing so.”

“But,” Kim says, “if we were to start digging into the flow of drugs in Jamrock… and this investigation should happen to lead us back to Martinaise…” He spreads his hands. “I’m not sure anyone could hold that against us.”

There’s silence around the table, but it’s not a bad one. Moreso contemplative.

“So, that’s our next Major Crimes project, as far as I’m concerned,” Jean says. “We start tracking down where the drugs in Jamrock are actually coming from. We know about the ULAN frequency… we know the drug trade has probably been using it to listen in on the RCM. Maybe it’s time we start listening in on them.”

Mack rubs at his chin. “So you want us to do the exact opposite of what Pryce wants us to do,” he says.

“No, I want you to factor in new information and use it to revisit old cases,” Jean says. “We now know where a significant portion of the drugs in Jamrock are coming from. Does this change anything for any of you? Let’s revisit old cases, revisit old CIs. Let’s look into this ULAN thing, see if any other criminal enterprises are using it. No stone unturned.”

“But the stones we’re turning are the ones we got told not to touch,” Chester says.

Kim takes his glasses off and starts cleaning them. “Don’t think of this as willful insubordination,” he says smoothly. “It may be the case that Major Crimes lays the groundwork for future arrests by the A-Wing. We don’t know. Right now, we’re just following leads... and we’re staying inside Jamrock, as we agreed to do.”

Jean spreads his hands, like, ‘there you have it.’ “And in the meantime,” he says, “continue working our other cases as normal.”

Judit shrugs. “Fine with me,” she says.

“Yeah, I don’t see a problem,” Sundance says.

“As long as we aren’t stepping on A-Wing’s toes,” Maggie puts in.

Jean makes a noncommittal gesture and doesn’t answer this.

EMPATHY: He’s fine with stepping on A-Wing’s toes.

“Well, if everyone else is in, fuck it,” Chester says, and Mack nods.

“I know I’m not a voting shareholder, as it were,” Trant says, “but I’m also in.”

Harry puts his hand in the middle of the table like they’re in a huddle. Everyone stares at it.

“Come on,” Harry says, beckoning them with his other hand. “Put your hands in.”

SAVOIR FAIRE: Do it for Coach!

ENCYCLOPEDIA: What does _that_ mean?

SAVOIR FAIRE: Whatever you want it to mean!

“For Coach,” Harry adds.

No one moves for an excruciatingly long moment, then Kim leans in and puts his hand over Harry’s. Thank God for Kim.

“Who’s ‘Coach’?” Sundance says, looking mystified. “ _You_?”

“Sure, why not,” Harry says.

Sundance shrugs, then puts his hand over Kim’s. Maggie, Mack, Trant and Judit follow suit.

Jean does the same sexy little eyeroll from earlier, but he puts his hand in too, and so does Chester.

“Fuckin’ A,” Harry says, grinning. “Break!” The hands disperse. “Let’s catch some bad guys.”

/

Jean is distracted for the rest of the day, and so is Kim. Harry tries to be useful to them, but Jean says, “You know what would help me most, Harry? If you took a look at the massive backlog of casework on your desk.” To which Harry counters, “I don’t remember any of these cases.”

“Well,” Jean says, his light eyes flashing, “maybe if you take a look, you’ll start to remember.”

Thus Harry commences six hours of poring over paperwork that doesn’t make a shred of sense to him. Memories pop up here and there, but it’s mostly an exercise in making his eyelids twitch. While he’s doing this, Kim and Jean sit in quiet behind him, occasionally muttering to each other about Ruby and La Puta Madre. Jean chainsmokes the entire time.

When they’re knocking off for the day and pulling their cloaks on to go out into the chilly March evening, Harry says to Jean in an undertone, “Could I hang at your place tonight? And can you, uh, give me a ride?”

“Sure,” Jean says, though something shifts on his face as he says it. To Kim, he says, “Lieutenant, what are you doing tonight?”

Kim, who’s shrugging on his bomber jacket, winces apologetically. “Viewing apartments,” he says.

“That’s right, you were saying,” Jean says. “Well, come over after, if you want.”

SUGGESTION: ‘Save me from having filthy sex with Harry that I’m going to hate myself about!’

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Kim says, smiling. “Thanks.”

EMPATHY: He won’t come over. He wants to, but his impulse is still to isolate himself.

SHIVERS: Loner. Lone wolf.

The drive back to Jean’s apartment is quiet. He street parks his MC along the tree-lined, leafy road behind his apartment building, and then Harry follows him up to his apartment, listening to Jean’s keys jingle in his hand, smelling his cologne and the scent of his cigarettes on the wind.

Only when they’re at Jean’s door does Jean say, while unlocking it, “By the way, you’ve been assigned twenty hours of mandatory counseling.”

“What?” Harry exclaims.

Jean pushes his apartment door open, and Harry follows him inside. “I passed Pryce in the hallway earlier, and he told me to tell you. He discussed it with Trant, apparently,” he says over his shoulder as he goes over to the sink and starts filling a water pitcher.

PERCEPTION: Going to water his plants.

Harry pulls the door shut behind them. “Trant’s going around discussing my brain?”

“Well, I did ask him to consult on that point,” Jean says, while shrugging his jacket off and loosening his tie.

Harry collapses onto Jean’s couch and watches him go around watering his plants and opening his blinds and windows. Golden light from the setting sun pours in.

Jean comes over and sits down beside him, placing his hand on Harry’s left thigh and squeezing it. “We need to talk,” he says, his voice serious.

Harry’s heart speeds up, seemingly more out of muscle memory than anything.

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: He’s said this to you several times before, and the ‘talk’ ends up being horrible every time. You can feel that in your throat and gut.

INLAND EMPIRE: The last time you ‘talked’ was when he delivered his ultimatum of ‘you have to choose between me and alcohol’. You ended up screaming at each other for an hour, then you staggered out into the snowy night and wandered the streets kicking over trash cans and crying. It felt like the end of the world.

“What do we have to talk about?” Harry says, with growing terror.

Jean rubs his thigh. “Work,” he says.

“Work?”

Jean nods, and doesn’t continue. Harry reaches up and strokes his cheek; Jean heaves a sigh.

“I’m worried about you coming back to work,” he says. “I’m worried about what we’re undertaking… that you’re going to get buried in it again, you won’t be able to stop yourself from drinking… that you’ll go back to being how you were.”

His grey eyes are suddenly aglow with tears, like little moons. In an effort to stop them from falling, Harry reaches up and pets his hair, but this only makes Jean cringe. He closes his eyes, and tears trickle down his cheeks.

“I’m not who I was,” Harry says. “I _can’t_ be who I was... I think I killed him.”

“No, you are,” Jean says in an anguished whisper. “You’re in there… I see you. I see flashes of you all the time.”

“But I don’t want to do again what I did before.”

“Harry, you don’t understand… you _never_ wanted to. That’s what you always said. ‘I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to be this guy. This isn’t who I really am.’ You’ve said it all. At what point does that become a mean fucking joke? What does it matter what you want? It matters what you _do_.”

“But I haven’t done anything to you,” Harry says, wiping Jean’s tears away with his thumb. “I mean, I know I have, but it wasn’t me, I don’t remember it. Maybe I can have a fresh start, now. Maybe I can finally be a different guy.”

Jean’s pain is so acute and intense that it hurts Harry just to sit near him and touch him, like he’s made of uranium. He isn’t actively crying; tears just continue to roll down his cheeks while he breathes raggedly.

“I know how this job gets,” Jean murmurs. “I know how you get, I know how the pressure gets to you, I know how you are. You’ll get bad again. It’s like the tide coming in and out, I can’t stop it.”

“I’ll get hobbies,” Harry says. “I’ll find healthy ways to deal with shit, I’ll get better. Please stop crying.”

Jean lets out a painful-sounding, choked laugh that’s half-hiccup. “I want to believe you so badly,” he rasps. “Each time, I want to believe you even more, and it hurts even more when you let me down.”

DRAMA: This is true; in fact it’s so true that it hurts him to say, like a flaming sword being pulled from his throat.

“I don’t want to hurt you. Jean… Jean.” Harry leans forward, resting his head against Jean’s shoulder. He feels like a misbehaved dog. “I don’t. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be that guy anymore.”

INLAND EMPIRE: Don’t want to be this kind of animal anymore?

Harry twitches as if shaking off a fly.

“Please,” he whispers, his voice a throaty gurgle. He presses his forehead hard against Jean’s bicep, feeling the warmth of him through the cheap fabric of his dress shirt. “I can do this. Please believe me.”

“What if you left the force for a while?” Jean says. “What if you took some leave?”

ENDURANCE: What, take leave and rot away in your shithole apartment or some rehab center somewhere, while he makes lieutenant in your absence? No way.

“I can’t,” Harry says.

“If it’s about money...”

“No, it’s about — I need to work.” He lifts his head. “Goddamnit, Jean, you know this. Why would you even ask me that?”

This lurches out of him unbidden: one of those flashes of old Harry. He can feel him crawling up his throat, trying to escape. Something about arguing with Jean churns his gut until he vomits up chunks of his old self. 

“This job destroys you,” Jean says. “You can’t withstand it. Some guys can’t.”

“Oh, is _that_ what this is about? I’m not man enough for you? I can’t handle the pressure, I’m old, I’m breaking down, I’m pathetic, I can’t always get hard — ”

“I don’t give a fuck if you can’t always get hard!” Jean’s so heated that his accent is nearly unintelligible. ‘ _Geev a faque.’_ “Sometimes _I_ can’t get hard! This has nothing to do with your precious fucking masculinity issues! It’s life or death, Harry, it’s about you annihilating yourself!”

With this, Jean bursts to his feet in a surge of athletic energy, striding away. Harry watches his back muscles moving like snakes under his shirt.

“You think you can handle it, and I can’t,” Harry says — addressing the back muscles, because Jean is leaning against his fireplace, refusing to face him. “You think everyone else can handle it, and I can’t. Mack fucking ‘glues his eyes shut’ Torson can handle it, and I can’t.”

Jean whips around. “You’ve _proven_ you can’t handle it,” he says. “And it isn’t about being a good cop, Harry! Fuck! You’re the best cop I’ve ever worked with! It’s about how you _get_!”

“How do I get?”

Jean’s breath catches in a way that Harry finds sexy. Damn, his blood pressure is up and now he’s all confused.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: He would stop yelling at you if he had your dick in his mouth. Just a thought.

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: Or in his ass.

Harry flashes on a memory of being inside Jean, fucking him in a bed.

PERCEPTION: It was either late at night or early in the morning, either way a time when the entire world is swaddled in silence, when it feels like you might be the only person alive on the planet. The bedroom was quiet except for the squeak of the bedsprings underneath you and the noises you two were making. You, labored grunts and exhales; Jean, sharp exhales and moans.

Harry’s dick twitches, hard. He’s so thrown by this that it takes him a beat to realize Jean is talking, and has been talking the entire time he’s been dwelling on this memory.

“— buried in it, obsessed with it, in a way that those guys don’t get, they can go home and set that shit aside, you never could,” Jean says. “I saw you in Martinaise, I saw how you — ” He breaks off, and his eyes narrow. “Stop that.”

“Stop what?” Harry says, trying to wipe any errant expressions off his face.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Jean says. “I can’t _believe_ you’re horny right now.”

SAVOIR FAIRE: Why is it so hard to put anything past this guy?

“Why don’t you come over here?” Harry says to him, staring into his eyes as blood flows south. “Come sit on my lap.”

“I don’t want to,” Jean says.

DRAMA: Liar.

Harry leans back against the soft, beaten-up couch, and pats his thighs. “C’mere. Let’s talk nice. Let’s relax a little. It’s been a long day… long couple of weeks.”

His voice is plaintive, but not insincere. His head hurts, and he’s tired, and he wants to hold Jean in his arms to alleviate this.

Jean folds his arms and leans against the pillar of exposed brick beside the fireplace, looking at him with alley-cat suspicion. “This conversation isn’t over,” he says. “We’re going to keep having it. I don’t care that you don’t want to, you owe it to me.”

SUGGESTION: Say ‘I understand.’ Don’t say ‘I get that you feel that way.’ Let your debt to him be a fact — don’t make it about his feelings.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Yeah, he’ll never fuck you if you do that.

“I understand,” Harry says, and beckons him again.

Jean comes over to the couch and stops in front of him, still eyeing him. He puts a knee between Harry’s splayed thighs and leans in to kiss him. Harry closes his eyes, disappearing into the bracing scrape of their facial hair and the soft wetness of Jean’s mouth. He wraps his arms around him, pulling his dress shirt free of his pants and sliding his hands up toward the heat of the small of his back. He can taste the salt of Jean’s tears on his lips.

“Evil prick,” Jean breathes into his mouth.

“Yeah, that’s me,” Harry breathes back, stroking his hair back from his face.

Jean reaches down to touch his hard dick, lightly grazing his fingers over it through the thick fabric of Harry’s pants, making a muscle in Harry’s gunshot thigh twitch painfully. “Is this for me?”

“Who else would it be for?” Harry says in a strained voice.

Jean kisses him some more, then sinks to his knees between Harry’s legs and starts undoing his belt.

“You’re gonna blow the evil prick?” Harry says, delirious with happy surprise.

“The thing is,” Jean murmurs, “I really like the evil prick. Because at the end of the day, do you know what I am?”

“A saint?”

“No. Fucking stupid.”

RHETORIC: Same thing.

Jean starts dragging Harry’s pants down toward his knees; Harry reaches down and pulls at Jean’s tie, loosening the knot and yanking it off his neck so he can toss it aside. All of this feels so familiar, almost routine.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: As I’ve told you, you two have slobbered on each other’s genitals many, many times.

Jean pulls Harry’s underwear down his hips, then, releasing his dick, letting it spring free. He takes it in one hand, then leans in to lick at the tip while looking obscenely up at Harry from underneath his eyelashes.

Harry grabs handfuls of the couch cushions and hisses; he feels like his veins are collapsing in a spasm of white heat. “Please,” he begs.

“Please what?” Jean says, idly stroking his shaft with a thumb, like Harry’s relative pain or pleasure couldn’t matter less to him.

“Please, please.”

“Do you want something, Harry?”

Harry feels like a wild animal. “ _Please_ suck my dick.”

Jean smirks at him. “I don’t know, I’m kind of enjoying this.”

“Oh, God... who’s the evil prick now?”

Jean drags his tongue lightly up Harry’s dick, then draws back from it again.

HALF LIGHT: This should be illegal, or at the very least, grounds for civil action.

“Please,” Harry begs again, his chest heaving.

Jean finally acquiesces, taking Harry fully into his mouth and starting to suck on him for real. Harry sags back against the couch, his body roiling with the fizz of arousal.

Jean’s a very good cocksucker, or maybe he just knows what Harry likes, or both. Harry doesn’t even know what Harry likes, but certain things, as soon as Jean does them, are like a blinding glimpse of the obvious. Oh, of course he likes having his nuts played with. Of course he likes a very specific type of suction. Of course he likes being teased, then relieved, then teased, then relieved.

Harry isn’t really sure what to do, so he mostly just lies slumped like a happy corpse. Sometimes he strokes Jean’s hair. He doesn’t know if that’s correct — it feels overly tender, or paternal, maybe — but it’s what he wants to do, so he does it.

When he comes, it’s like being shocked with a few hundred volts; Harry can feel it in the roots of his hair, and he cries out and trembles, his wrecked thigh muscle spasming again. Jean lifts his head and takes Harry’s shirttail into his hand, then spits his come into it.

“Jean!” Harry exclaims, as soon as he’s able to form speech again. “That’s my shirt!”

Jean shrugs. “It’s your come,” he says, and gets to his feet, going over to the kitchen.

Harry turns on the couch and watches Jean as he fetches a glass bottle of milk from the fridge and drinks straight from it, swishing it around in his mouth before spitting again into the sink. His post-orgasm brain feels wet and heavy, like the hunk of meat that it is. It’s hard to form full thoughts or sentences instead of fragments. The only idea he keeps continually seizing on is that he wants to cuddle with Jean.

“Do you want me to blow you, too?” Harry offers.

“No,” Jean says, turning around and leaning against the sink. “I’m fine. I want to do some paperwork, actually.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, I want to get this Martinaise due diligence wrapped up and out of the way.”

“Can’t we maybe relax for a while?” Harry wheedles. He turns and points to the projector that’s sitting near the fireplace, with stacks of 8mm video cassettes beside it. “Can we watch a movie?”

He turns back to Jean, who seems to have softened.

“You want to watch a movie?” Jean says.

“Yeah. Please. And can we cuddle?”

Jean looks simultaneously resigned and grief-stricken, for some reason. “Okay,” he says. “We can cuddle and watch a movie.”

/

They end up watching one of the flicks from that spy series Jean told Harry about, the one he used to do an impression from. The movie itself feels distantly familiar to Harry, somehow, but he doesn’t actually remember any of the plot or the jokes, so he keeps barking out laughs and making noises of surprise while Jean lays in his arms in comfortable silence.

“How many times have you seen this?” Harry says to him, when they’re nearing the end.

“A few,” Jean says.

“How many times have _I_ seen this?”

“Many, many times.”

“Oh. I don’t remember it.”

“I can tell,” Jean says.

Harry presses his lips and mouth to the crown of Jean’s head, kissing him and sniffing his hair, which smells pleasantly of cigarette smoke. Jean tips his head back and looks at Harry in curiosity, then snuggles more firmly into his chest.

The movie’s credits are rolling when a knock comes at Jean’s door. Jean sits up, placing a hand on Harry’s chest as he does so. “Hello?” he calls.

“It’s Kitsuragi,” Kim calls through the door.

“Kim!” Harry says in delight, as Jean gets up and crosses the room toward the door. When he gets there, he pauses and mouths something to Harry.

“What?” Harry mouths back.

Jean mouths again.

VISUAL CALCULUS: He’s telling you to pull your pants up. Your pants are still around your knees, with the fly undone.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: He doesn’t want Kim walking in and immediately realizing that he was giving you sloppy toppy earlier.

Harry does up his pants, and Jean undoes the deadbolt and chain, pulling the door open. Kim is in the doorway, looking a little tired.

“Done viewing apartments?” Jean says, beckoning him inside.

“Actually, I was just looking at one in this building,” Kim says, following Jean, who indicates for him to sit in the easychair that buttresses the couch.

“Were you?” Jean says in surprise. “This place is shit, just so you know. The property management is shit too.”

“You missed your calling, being a cop,” Kim says with a dry smile. “You should have been a realtor.” He takes his glasses off and starts rubbing his eyes, then doesn’t put them back on.

“You want something to drink?” Jean says. “Coffee?” He checks his watch. “Decaf?”

“Decaf sounds great,” Kim says, nodding. “Thank you.”

Jean goes over to his coffeemaker and starts doing coffeemaker things, while Harry laughs and says, “You guys drink _decaf_? You grandmas.”

“Some people like to sleep at night, instead of wandering the city drunk,” Jean says under his breath.

“I heard that,” Harry says.

“Good, you were supposed to,” Jean says at full volume.

When Harry turns back to Kim, he sees that Kim is leaning back in the chair, his hands intertwined and resting in his lap, one leg crossed over the other.

PERCEPTION: He’s getting comfortable. He feels at ease around the two of you.

ESPRIT DE CORPS: That’s high praise from Kim. He doesn’t feel that way around very many people.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: It helps that you guys have fucked, are fucking, and can’t stop bickering in front of him. Hard to feel self-conscious around the deranged alcoholic whose life you saved, and the perpetually irritated guy who licks his balls.

“Kim?” Harry says to him. “Can I ask you a question?”

He nods.

“Why are you lonely?”

Kim looks struck by surprise. “Um,” he says. “Did someone say I was lonely?”

Harry gestures. “The universe told me you were,” he says.

“Excuse me?” Kim says.

RHETORIC: He heard you, he just wants you to repeat it.

“The universe,” Harry says, lamely. He gestures again, grabbing at invisible air currents.

Kim smiles. His glasses have left purple dents below each eye, and on either side of the bridge of his nose. Maybe that’s why he took them off. Without them, he has to squint, like a boiadeiro looking into the sun.

“The forties can be a lonely decade,” he says. “Especially for us revolution-era workaholics.”

“Am _I_ lonely?” Harry says.

“I don’t know, detective, are you?”

Harry shrugs. “Do I seem lonely?”

Kim’s head moves in a slow nod.

“Oh,” Harry says.

“Are the thirties not a lonely decade?” Jean says, leaning against the counter while coffee drips into the pot.

“They can be,” Kim says. “Are you lonely?”

Jean considers it. “Lonely isn’t the right word,” he says.

EMPATHY: Bitter, angry, burned out, used, spurned, broken, abandoned — those are better words.

“Precinct 57 has a tough culture,” Kim says, turning his gaze to his hands as he plays with his glasses. “Well, maybe not ‘tough’. Tough for me, at least. I don’t enjoy politics, sports, or mind games… not at work.”

Jean winces. “Sorry.”

Kim looks over at him, raising his eyebrows.

“I just realized I’m dragging you into workplace politics, with this task force shit,” Jean says.

“No, no, we’re subverting politics, not participating in them,” Kim says. “I like subverting politics, I think it’s funny.”

“Even when people get mad?” Harry says.

“Especially when people get mad.” Kim smiles again. “We’re not doing anything wrong. The Coalition is in the wrong, and they know that. That’s why they’re operating so much in the shadows, and they’re relying on our unquestioning cooperation to do so. I don’t want to give it to them.”

LOGIC: By the way — just throwing this out there — people who put themselves through unnecessary trials of will are usually people who have been systematically mistreated in some way.

“Your old coworkers didn’t like you,” Harry says, looking into Kim’s eyes.

Kim shrugs, still smiling. “I didn’t like _them_ ,” he says. “And they could tell. People don’t appreciate not being liked. I was always cordial with everyone, but I never got invited to any barbecues.”

ENCYCLOPEDIA: The GRIH is a very racially and culturally homogenous area, and Precinct 57 is almost exclusively staffed by heterosexual men who married at the age of 22. Kim was marked as an outsider before he ever marked himself as one.

LOGIC: Maybe he marked himself as one to circumvent being marked. ‘You can’t reject me, I reject _you_.’

“ _I_ like you,” Harry says. “And I’m still not completely sure what the deal with racism is.”

“That’s one mystery you don’t need to bother trying to solve,” Kim says, then pauses. “I didn’t say anything about racism, did I?”

“No, the universe did,” Harry says, tapping his temple.

“Well, I was thinking about it,” Kim says. “So I think maybe you just read my expression?”

“Yeah, I think Harry’s convinced that there’s something supernatural to his unconscious cognition,” Jean says, pouring the coffee into mugs. “But he’s always been like this, he reads people incessantly. He has an insanely high confession rate. It’s part of why Trant’s always found him so interesting.”

COMPOSURE: Jean is one of the only people for whom this works in reverse, one of the only people who can read you as well as you can read him.

INLAND EMPIRE: Dora was one of those people, too. Your impulse is to drive people like that away — there’s a hole in the center of your soul that you don’t want them sticking their fingers in.

Kim doesn’t seem entirely convinced. He’s giving Harry a funny look.

EMPATHY: He’s thinking of all your weird prattle about ‘communism killed him’, Lely enjoying the moment of his death, Billie’s missing husband — all the things you knew inexplicably, things that go beyond unconscious cognition, lucky guesses, or hunches.

REACTION SPEED: The kind of thing that’s going on right now, where you’re looking at him and reading his mind. _That_ stuff.

COMPOSURE: Try not to look like you’re reading his mind.

Jean comes over and hands Kim a mug. “Do you take anything in it?”

“Black is fine,” Kim says. “Thanks.”

Jean returns and sits down next to Harry’s feet, sipping his own mug of coffee.

“You wanna watch a movie?” Harry says to Kim, while putting his sock feet in Jean’s lap. Jean bats them away with force, like a cat, and Harry pouts at him.

“I’d love to watch a movie,” says Kim, ignoring this failed attempt at footsie. “As long as I don’t have to put my glasses back on. What’s the movie?”

“ _Exploits D'espions Deux_ , probably,” Jean says. “We just watched the first one.”

“Oh, perfect, I’ve already seen that like three times,” Kim says, sipping his coffee.

Jean gets up and crosses the room to the projector, kneeling beside it and starting to go through his 8mm canisters. “Lieutenant,” he says, “has Pryce talked to you about assigning you a partner?”

“Me?” Harry says.

Jean sighs. “First of all, I don’t call you ‘lieutenant’,” he says, without turning around. “Second of all, you _have_ a partner.”

ENCYCLOPEDIA: It’s him, he’s the partner.

VOLITION: Yeah, thanks, dipshit.

“I didn’t know what you were talking about,” Harry says defensively. “It could be a partner for something else. A partner for a croquet game, maybe.”

Jean turns to him, then. “You think I was asking you,” he says, his voice dripping with contempt, “if our captain has assigned you a partner for croquet?”

“Maybe?”

“No. I was talking to Kim.”

“The captain hasn’t brought that up with me yet,” Kim says.

“Wait, they’re gonna give you a partner?” Harry says to Kim, turning to him. “But _I’m_ your partner.”

“No, you’re _my_ partner,” Jean says.

RHETORIC: Sounding slightly at the end of his patience with you, here.

“Well, you know what I mean,” Harry says. “We’re all partners. We can be a three-man band, can’t we?”

Kim smiles at him. “‘Partner’ implies _deux_ ,” he says. “Two halves of a whole. Plus, lieutenants are rarely partnered together long-term, anyway.”

“Why?” Harry says.

“Well, décomptage,” Kim says, spreading his hands. “Two lieutenants to a wing, generally… four sergeants, eight patrol officers… partnering a wing’s two lieutenants together is somewhat counterproductive, since it robs the sergeants of an opportunity to learn from a superior officer, and it also consolidates power. Captains prefer to partner sergeants with lieutenants, make each sergeant a satellite officer, and then, in essence, have four lieutenants.” He pauses. “My last partner was a sergeant.”

EMPATHY: A darkness settles over Kim as he says this.

“What happened to him?” Harry says.

“He died,” Kim says. “Line of duty death. He was shot.”

ESPRIT DE CORPS: Shot in the throat. He died gurgling, choking on his own blood. Kim wasn’t by his side, he didn’t see it happen — he was across the shipping yard, crouched behind a container, pinned down by enemy fire. He and his partner had responded to what they thought was a burglary at a port, but turned out to be a massive drug deal. Kim barely got out alive.

“I’m sorry,” Harry says.

“It’s okay,” Kim says. “It’s been a while.” He clears his throat and adds, “I didn’t take a new partner, after that.”

“Why not?” Harry says.

Kim’s dark eyes twinkle, but his mouth is sad.

EMPATHY: He was in mourning, dumbass. And he felt responsible for this guy’s death, besieged with guilt that he couldn’t save him.

SUGGESTION: The lone wolf got even lonelier.

Harry looks over at Jean, who’s looking at Kim in compassionate silence. “Were you a sergeant?” he asks him.

Jean flicks his gaze from Kim to Harry, and nods. “I made sergeant a few weeks before they partnered me with you, actually,” he says.

“So that’s the last thing you ever were?” Harry says.

Jean snorts and does finger quotes. “‘ _The last thing you ever were_.’ He thinks highly of himself, doesn’t he?” he says to Kim, who starts laughing. “Yes, that was the last rank I held before Satellite-Officer, correct. But you got promoted twice while we were partners.”

“Did you ever get promoted?” Harry says.

“Satellite-officers can’t be promoted,” Kim says, rubbing his eyes again. “They exist in a kind of twilight… they share their partner’s rank without actually having it, and they can’t get promoted, only their partner can. Their role within the station is defined in relation to their partner, which can be… difficult.” He drops his hand and gives Jean an apologetic look. “Sorry.”

Jean shrugs. “It’s the truth,” he says. He holds up an 8mm canister. “Not to interrupt our depressing conversation, but I found the movie.”

“By all means, interrupt,” Kim says with a smile.

/

Harry wakes up the next day with a headache, like he always does — his working theory on this is that he’s grappling with some kind of semi-permanent dehydration resulting from a decade of alcohol abuse.

Sunlight is streaming through Jean’s bedroom window, glowing between the blinds in thin white lines. Harry squints hatefully at it, then rolls over.

Jean is standing by the foot of the bed, drenched in sweat, balancing on one foot as he unlaces and pulls off his sneakers. They had fallen asleep in each other’s arms last night after Kim went home, and Harry has a faint, dreamlike memory from about an hour ago of Jean kissing his shoulder and whispering, “I’ll be back.”

“Were you out running?” Harry says.

Jean nods.

“Why are you always running?” Harry says. “Who are you running from? What are you running to?”

“I just like running,” Jean says, his voice hoarse and his breaths labored. He pulls his shirt off over his head; Harry stares at his flushed, sweaty torso. “I’m gonna get in the shower, can you make some coffee?”

“Okay,” Harry says, shifting in the sheets. “Do we have work today?”

“It’s Saturday,” Jean says, pulling his sweatpants down and off.

PERCEPTION: FALN track pants! Cuno would approve.

“So no?” Harry says.

“That’s a no,” Jean says, glancing at him. “I do want to go in tomorrow, briefly, to file some of this paperwork. But not today. I’m taking a break today.”

He pulls his boxers down and kicks them away from himself, then turns shyly away when Harry’s eyes go to his dick.

“Sorry,” Harry says, but he doesn’t shift his gaze, so now he’s looking at Jean’s ass.

ENDURANCE: If he didn’t want you to look, he shouldn’t have stripped in front of you.

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: It is perfectly fine and normal to look at your man’s naked dick and ass.

HALF LIGHT: Is he your man? Are you _his_ man?

“It’s fine,” Jean says, pulling the bathroom door open and disappearing behind it, pulling it shut with a click.

EMPATHY: He knows that you’re handsy and you like to look. Dicks, butts, boobs, whatever, you’re a visual guy. A little bit of a pig.

REACTION SPEED: Oink oink.

EMPATHY: Jean doesn’t really hold this against you, he’s just feeling shy. It’s eight in the morning, a weird time to be ogled — plus it’s cold outside, so there was some shrinkage going on, penis-wise.

Harry sits there in the messy sheets thinking about Jean’s body until he hears the shower start to run, and then he gets up and gets dressed, tucking his come-encrusted shirttail into yesterday’s pants. Then he heads for the kitchen, rubbing his temples in a weak attempt to dispel the ever-present tension there.

While he’s making coffee and waiting for Jean, a plan forms in his head. It’s the plan of a newly sober person — simultaneously overly ambitious and moronically simple, and coming packaged with an assumption that if he just carries it out, everything else will fall into place, and he’ll be on the path toward a new life. He’s full of hope and a sense of purpose.

Harry has finished making the coffee and is drinking a cup of it when he hears the shower shut off. A few minutes later, Jean comes out of the bedroom, dressed in casual clothes and damp, his wet hair styled and combed into place. He appears to have trimmed his goatee; it looks neater.

Jean comes over to Harry, who hands him a cup of coffee and says, “I have to go run some errands, are you still gonna be here if I come back in a few hours?”

Jean squints at him. “Errands?”

“Yeah.”

“What errands?”

“It’s a surprise,” Harry says defensively.

PERCEPTION: Jean’s face sprints through a series of emotions — confusion, then dismay, then devastation, then resignation.

“The errands are _not_ me getting drunk,” Harry adds.

“Then what are they?” Jean says, sipping his coffee.

“It’s a surprise.”

Jean looks at him with big, worried eyes and a flat mouth. The light from the window over the sink is streaming over his face, softening his features and making him look younger.

DRAMA: He doesn’t trust you at all, sire. There is not a drop of trust in the ocean of his being.

“Look, you don’t have to believe me,” Harry says, “because I’m telling the truth. I’ll be back, in two hours, and I won’t be drunk, and I want you to be here when I get back. Okay?”

Jean nods. “I’ll be here,” he says.

“Alright.” Out of muscle memory, Harry leans into the damp warmth of him and gives him a goodbye peck on the cheek, then draws back, confused.

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: That didn’t feel right, for some reason.

“I don’t usually do that to you, do I?” he says.

“What, kiss me on the cheek?” Jean says, sounding amused. “No, you‘ve never done that.”

“Oh. Maybe it’s someone else I used to do that to, then.”

“On that very flattering note,” Jean says, “get out of here, if you’re going.”

Harry drains the rest of his cup of coffee and sets the mug down on the counter. “I swear I’ll be back.”

“Whatever,” Jean agrees.

/

Harry’s list of errands is as follows:

  1. Wander Boogie Street until you find a barbershop.
  2. Squint at the sign in the window and see that a haircut and shave there cost 15 reál.
  3. Keep wandering Boogie Street.
  4. Find a worse barbershop, one where a shave and a haircut costs only 10 reál, but there are no customers and only one old barber, who has no teeth. When you walk in, he is sweeping.
  5. Ask him for a shave and a haircut, but not too much of a shave and a haircut. Tell him you want ear-length hair and more reasonable muttonchops, but you do not want to be bare-faced, because you’re scared about what’s underneath.
  6. Say, “I am a raging alcoholic and I look like it, and I need some coverage or I will look like a shorn sheep.”
  7. Wait for the barber to spit agreeably on the floor in response and then invite you to sit in the nearest chair, which has a massive tear in the seat.
  8. Sit down and let him tie a bib around your neck.
  9. Close your eyes.
  10. Listen to the scissors click and the clippers whir. Both pleasant sounds.
  11. Listen to sirens and gunshots from somewhere in the distance — less pleasant sounds.
  12. Hear the barber say, “Good?” as he shoves a mirror into your hand.
  13. Open your eyes and dutifully examine the back of your head with the mirror, despite not really caring what the back of your head looks like, then look at yourself in the larger mirror in front of you.
  14. You look fine. No, seriously, you look okay. Your face is less pale and corpse-like today, some of the alcoholic swelling has receded, and despite the yellowing bruise around one of your eyes, with a haircut and a beard trim you almost look — dare I say — normal? Like a guy. A guy who’s put himself through hell, but no longer like one who is currently homeless.
  15. Make The Expression at yourself in the mirror, then hand the silent barber 11 reál, adding an extra one as a tip (he grunts “Thank you.”)
  16. Go back out into the world with more confidence, enjoying the sunshine and breeze on your less encumbered face and head.
  17. Get harassed by two street youths who are sitting on a stoop screaming “F——T!” at everyone who walks by, regardless of their age, gender, or attire.
  18. Despite still not quite being sure what a f——t is, scream, “YEAH, AND?” in response, sending them into stunned silence.
  19. Keep striding along sidewalks that are congested with people out doing Saturday shopping. Find your way back to your apartment building, operating on muscle memory.
  20. Step inside your apartment, which smells like stale air and emotional stagnancy, and go to your bedroom.
  21. Open your closet and start going through your clothes.
  22. Realize that you own a lot of ridiculous clothes.
  23. Put on something that is still disco, but somewhat more nice and formal than your usual attire. Keep the snakeskin shoes on, though.
  24. Reapply deodorant, and then spray some cologne on yourself. Realize the cologne smells like ass. Open a window and try to disperse the cologne scent from your jacket.
  25. Leave your sad apartment, locking the door behind you, and head back down Boogie Street in search of a grocery store.
  26. Find one that is crowded with customers and employees who all look catatonically suicidal, and is in a general state of disarray, with an unswept floor and loose crates of oranges lying around.
  27. Go to their flower section.
  28. Grab the second-cheapest bouquet you can find.
  29. Consider shoplifting it, because no one in here would notice, but remember you are a police officer and go to a checkout line so you can pay 2 reál for it.
  30. Notice, when you step outside, that the bouquet is kind of smushed and wilted, but shrug about this and start heading back to Jean’s.



/

When Harry stops outside of Jean’s apartment door, he finds himself unexpectedly nervous. With one hand, he smooths back his hair, which the barber had slapped some pomade into, and with the other hand (the one the wilted flowers are clutched in) he knocks.

Jean opens the door a moment later, like he was waiting in anticipation of the knock. “Hi,” he says, giving Harry a confused once-over as he beckons him in and closes the door behind him.

“Hi,” Harry says, smiling.

“What are you doing?” Jean says, folding his arms. “Did you get a haircut?”

“I did. Do you like it?”

“Yeah, it’s fine,” Jean says. He sounds distracted, and continues to search Harry for clues as to what’s going on.

EMPATHY: He does actually like the haircut a lot — it’s a relief to see you looking less bedraggled.

“I’m here to ask you to go on a date with me,” Harry says, and thrusts the sad flowers at him. A petal falls off of one and wafts to the floor.

Jean stares at the bouquet, takes it from him, then leans in and sniffs his mouth and neck.

PERCEPTION: Trying to pick up the scent of alcohol.

“I am not _drunk_!” Harry exclaims. “I’m trying to be a normal human being! For fuck’s sake!”

“You bought me flowers?”

“Yeah, do you not like flowers?”

“I guess I like flowers,” Jean says, shrugging. “No one’s ever given me any before.”

“You have plants,” Harry says. “So I thought you might like flowers.”

Jean smiles in response to this. “I hate that cologne, by the way,” he says. “It’s awful.”

“Yeah, sorry, I hate it too. So will you go on a date with me?”

Jean goes over to his kitchen with the flowers in hand and squats in front of his sink, opening up the cabinets underneath it. “I don’t know if I even have a vase,” he mutters. “Sure, Harry, we can go on a date. Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know,” Harry says. “I didn’t think this through that far. Uhh…”

CONCEPTUALIZATION: Take him to an art museum and tell him what you think the art is about. People love that, it makes them very horny.

“Art museum?” he suggests. “Is there one in Jamrock?”

Jean finds a vase and stands, turning the tap on to fill it up. “Yes, but it’s not very good, and you hate it,” he says. “It’s modern art, mostly, which you think is stupid… There’s a nice one in Revachol East, though, it has stuff the Suzerain stole from all over the world. Why do you want to go to an art museum?”

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: For horny!

“I don’t know, it just sounds like a nice place for a date,” Harry says, sliding his hands into his pockets. He feels something inside of one, and pulls it out to look at it: it’s a receipt from a liquor store. “Plus, I feel like I should get cultured, because I’ve forgotten — fucking shit! The last time I wore these pants I bought _five bottles of vodka_ at a liquor store?”

“That sounds normal, for you,” Jean says, setting the vase on his counter and dropping the bouquet into it. More petals fall off; the flowers are now looking downright pathetic.

“The flowers were a mistake,” Harry says morosely.

“No, I like them,” Jean says. For some reason, he’s still smiling. “I’m gonna go change.”

/

The East Revachol art museum that Jean was referring to is one of the cultural gemstones embedded in the lush, rolling hills of Le Jardin, along with the zoo and the aquarium. Harry realizes this as they start to get close to it, and his heart starts pounding in real fear.

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: You came here with Dora so often. She often took you to Le Jardin and showed you how the other half lives, before she slaughtered you like a pig. The streets here run red with your blood.

In an effort to distract himself from this, Harry asks Jean, “Did we ever go on dates here?”

Jean laughs. He’s driving — sunglasses on, hands loose on the wheel. “You never once took me on a date,” he says. “In your defense, I never took _you_ on a date, either.”

Harry’s quiet, staring out the windscreen as they turn down a quiet side road and begin gliding along the banks of the Esperance. The art museum is up ahead: an imposing, many-windowed building with a green domed ceiling, perched at the river’s edge.

“I think I came here with Dora all the time,” Harry says, his mouth dry.

“I’m sure you did,” Jean says, sounding unmoved. “She was from here, I think.”

Harry looks over at him. “How do _you_ know that?”

Jean does the sexy eyeroll again. “I’m your best friend, you fucking moron.”

“You know, you don’t have to take that so personally,” Harry says.

“Take what personally? Your amnesia?”

“Yeah, and me being surprised when you remember shit. It’s just weird to like, have forgotten everything about yourself and the world, and then remember something, and tell it to someone, and have them say, ‘Yeah, duh, idiot, I already knew that.’”

“But I know everything about you!”

“Well, just don’t be so mean about it.”

Jean starts laughing, bending over the steering wheel, then straightens up as traffic slows and he has to brake. “Fine, Harry,” he says. “I won’t be so mean to you about your broken, shitty brain.”

“Thank you,” Harry says, in a stiff attempt at dignity.

“You should really see a real doctor about this, though. One besides Gottlieb.”

“I don’t have any money,” Harry says.

“We have health insurance,” Jean says.

“Oh, do we?”

“Yes. It’s terrible, but we do have it.”

They get lucky and pull up in front of the sprawling stone steps of the museum right as an MC that was parked out front is pulling away. Jean takes the empty spot, and they hop out, their RCM cloaks fluttering in the light breeze.

Harry looks around him. Something about Le Jardin is fundamentally different from Jamrock; even the air smells different, like peaches. Everyone is dressed nicely, and no one seems to be in a hurry. The buildings are all made of gorgeous stonework, and lush green trees tower over them, bending over the lip of the riverbank.

“Why is it so pretty here?” Harry says to Jean.

Jean makes the universal gesture for money.

“Maybe money isn’t so bad, then, if it makes things this pretty,” Harry says.

“Yeah, you can fall back on that the next time you’re crouched on the floor of your shithole apartment because there’s a driveby going on and someone’s shooting out your windows,” Jean says, winking at him. “‘At least they’re living the good life over in Le Jardin!’”

They start up the steps, passing people who are sitting and chatting, drinking coffee, eating pastries, laughing, wearing expensive hats.

“Are you a pessimist?” Harry says to Jean.

“I don’t think so,” Jean says.

“But you’re mad about so many things.”

“I’m mad about them because I want them to be better,” Jean says. “I don’t think that’s pessimism. It’s hope. It’s fucking stupid, is what it is.”

Harry thinks about what Kim said, how every school of thought and government has failed in Revachol, and yet he loves it nonetheless.

CONCEPTUALIZATION: Every faith and hope Jean has had for you has failed, and yet he loves you nonetheless.

“I don’t think hope is stupid,” Harry says.

Jean doesn’t reply. They head through the massive gold revolving door and into the grand entry hall of the museum. A large sign says ADMISSION: 10 REÁL, but Jean notices Harry noticing this and says to him, “It’s fine, cops get in for free.”

“Do we really?” Harry says, delighted.

“Mhm. One of the few perks.”

They follow a line cordoned off by velvet ropes to a large granite desk, where a bored-looking woman is sitting. Jean hands her his badge, and Harry follows suit; in exchange, she hands them stickers with LE JARDIN MUSEUM OF FINE ART on them.

“Oh, shit,” Harry says in excitement, immediately peeling it off of its paper backing and sticking it to the center of his tie.

Jean laughs at this before applying his own sticker to the breast pocket of his RCM cloak.

They join a tour, because Harry is so dizzied by the vast array of sculptures, tapestries, and paintings as tall as the walls that he feels like he needs some kind of structure to be imposed on this visit. The two of them trail along behind a group of mostly elderly people while a docent drones on about Dolorian-century art.

Harry, lacking in the historical knowledge needed to put the docent’s remarks into context, mostly tunes him out. In the center of an immense, dome-ceilinged room full of sculptures, he stops in front of one of Dolores Dei and stares at it.

“What?” Jean says.

Harry doesn’t reply; he stares at her glowing lungs, then reaches out and presses his palm to the center of Jean’s chest.

Jean looks down at his hand. “Harry,” he says, with unease creeping into his gruff voice.

AUTHORITY: Cops shouldn’t do weird gay shit like this in public — it undermines trust in the RCM.

CONCEPTUALIZATION: Can you let one significant moment elapse without having a masculinity crisis about it, please? You don’t understand art at all.

INLAND EMPIRE: Jean has had so many chances to leave you, and he still hasn’t left. Like a kicked dog, he keeps coming back. Why not? What is he waiting for?

SHIVERS: What are _you_ waiting for?

Harry stares at Dolores Dei for another moment, then breaks his gaze and drops his hand from Jean’s chest. “Let’s ditch this tour,” he says, jerking his head in the direction of the docent, who’s standing about twenty feet away droning on about the Antedolorian court. “Let’s go sit somewhere and talk.”

Jean nods.

A few rooms down, they find an atrium with massive windows that look out at a lush garden full of winding paths and filled with sculptures. In the center, there’s a fountain rimmed with benches. Harry takes a seat, and Jean follows suit, then lights a cigarette. The atrium is full of people milling around, but no one else is sitting on the benches, so the deafening sound of the fountain affords them some privacy.

“Tell me about what we’re like as partners,” Harry says. “Not the sex stuff… the case stuff, the cases I can’t remember. The cases we worked before Martinaise.”

Jean blows out smoke. “What do you want to know?”

“What’s our dynamic?”

Jean smiles. “What, like, who’s good cop and who’s bad cop?”

“Sure.”

“It’s not like that.”

“Humor me,” Harry says.

“Well,” Jean says, smoking more, “you already know what you’re like as a cop. One thing we have in common is being stubborn. People used to joke that it’s a good thing we got partnered, because we’d each drive anyone else crazy. You and I used to spend hours on cold cases, just trading theories back and forth, trying to crack them. When we got fixated on something, we’d stay at the station until one in the morning… through first watch, second watch, third watch, poring over evidence.”

“Did we ever crack a cold case?”

“Sometimes,” Jean says. “Once in a while. Often enough to keep us chasing that high. But we both just enjoy the process. And you’re an incredible cop,” he says, suddenly sounding forlorn. “McCoy is better at day-to-day police work, community policing, keeping neighborhoods in line... there are cops at the 41st who are better at PR, who win more awards, who secure us more funding… but I always thought you were the best we had.”

“Why?” Harry says, his voice soft.

Jean shrugs. His face is shrouded in sadness, his shoulders slumped as he smokes. “You’re just relentless,” he says. “You don’t give up. The only thing you’ve ever given up on was yourself.”

“I’m trying,” Harry says. “I don’t know the guy who gave up on me, I’m not him. I know you think I am, but I’m not. Something changed. I don’t recognize that guy.”

“I want to believe that,” Jean says, with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. He’s still not looking at Harry. “I would love to believe that.”

“But you don’t.”

“There’s a significant difference between ‘I don’t want to be that guy anymore’ and ‘I am not that guy anymore.’ You’ve conflated the two before. To be honest, I’m starting to worry that the good things about you can’t exist without the bad.”

Harry’s quiet, watching his face.

Jean finally looks over at him. “It’s your obsessiveness,” he says. “You want to solve every case in the world. You want to solve why this woman left you. You want to drink all the alcohol that was ever produced. You want to do every drug known to man. You want to fuck half the people you meet. You have this insatiable desire for _input_.”

“Was I always like this? Because if I wasn’t, that means I can change.”

“Maybe you were,” Jean says. “I wouldn’t know. I didn’t know you when you were a gym teacher in Couron. Probably a mindless job like that was better for you, one where you were going home too physically exhausted to dwell on shit. Plus, you had nothing to dwell on, besides I guess your bad childhood that you never talk about.”

“Is that why you think I should take some leave? Because being a cop is why I drink?”

“Yes,” Jean says simply, gazing at him.

Harry nods. “Were you happy to get partnered with me?” he says.

“Of course I was,” Jean says. “I admired you as an officer, and I had a crush on you. I followed you around like a puppy for years. You could do no wrong, in my eyes. I knew you had a drinking problem, but I didn’t think it was a big deal… what cop doesn’t have a little bit of a drinking problem?”

Harry’s quiet. The gush of the fountain behind them, birds chirping outside, and people’s footsteps echoing in the atrium rush in to fill the silence.

“When did it get bad?” he says.

“Slowly,” Jean says. “Very slowly. You started blowing off paperwork, so fine, I did your paperwork. I didn’t mind. We’re partners, and I understand what depression is like… I thought you would come out of it eventually. Then you started blowing off the administrative aspects of the task force, like reporting to Pryce, and running meetings, so I took those over — at first, I was happy to do it. It was lieutenant shit. It’s unheard of for a cop to make lieutenant before forty, so I actually felt…” His lips curl in a disgust that is obviously aimed at himself. “ _Special_ to have been entrusted with those duties.”

“And then what happened?” Harry says, even though he already knows.

INLAND EMPIRE: What happened is what always happens: what starts out as bearable becomes unbearable. Irony becomes sincere. The temporary becomes permanent; indulgence becomes habit.

Jean shakes his head. “Your behavior outside of work got worse, it started bleeding over. People on the task force partied with you, they knew firsthand how unhinged you were getting, and your leadership suffered, which pissed you off. You worked more cases alone, without me, because…” He trails off.

“Why?” Harry prods him.

“Stop that,” Jean snaps, color rising in his cheeks. “Back off. I’m not a _suspect_. This is hard for me.”

EMPATHY: Very hard, in fact — it’s like talking around a knife embedded in his thorax.

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: He keeps running out of steam mid-sentence because he’s taking shallow breaths, like people do when they’re upset.

“Sorry,” Harry says. “I’m not trying to can-open you.”

Jean snorts and finishes his cigarette, then tosses the butt into the fountain behind them, blowing smoke out through his mouth. “I was your _conscience_ ,” he says. “So you started sneaking around behind my back to do shit you knew I wouldn’t approve of.”

Harry thinks of Kim, of how he waited until Kim was asleep to rob Cuno’s dad of drugs, and his heart sinks from his chest down into the soles of his shoes.

INLAND EMPIRE: See? Don’t kid yourself, you haven’t changed. No one in the course of human history has ever changed.

HALF LIGHT: And why should you? These degenerates need order imposed on them. You’re the law.

“You beat the shit out of that drunk while I wasn’t around,” Jean adds.

“Burke,” Harry says.

“So you do remember.”

“No, but I read about it in my case files.”

Jean inhales, then sighs. “Yes. I wasn’t there for that. I got dragged into Pryce’s office to answer for what you’d done before I even knew about it. I had to start making shit up on the spot… I assured him that you must have felt threatened, and Pryce asked me if you were drunk, and I said, no, sir. But I knew you must have been.”

“Then why did you say I wasn’t?”

Jean scoffs and splutters, “Because you would have been sacked, Harry!”

“Maybe I should have been,” Harry says.

“Maybe! But I never had it in me to let that happen. And what about the people you’ve helped? What about the murders you’ve solved? What about the drug dealers and gangsters and killers you’ve taken off the streets? What about the good you’ve done? Is it my place to put a stop to that just because you couldn’t stop fucking drinking? Is that fair to the people of Jamrock? And why is that _my_ decision to make?”

Harry swallows over a lump in his throat. “It’s hard for me,” he says, “to be held accountable for things I didn’t do… wouldn’t do.”

“But you did do them!”

“But not _me…_ the other me. The guy who fucked off and left me to pick up the pieces. The guy I can’t remember being.”

Jean’s breath catches in a laugh of disbelief. “So, what, we’re both the victim of Harry, despite the fact that you _are_ Harry?”

“I don’t remember doing those things, Jean, and I wouldn’t do them now. And I haven’t drank. This entire time, ever since I woke up that day, I haven’t drank once.”

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Yeah… what’s the deal with that? Drinking would definitely alleviate the pain in your head and face, and the awful, crushing remorse that’s gripping your internal organs right now. Let amber liquid release cascade over you and deliver you from this hellish plane.

VOLITION: Shut the fuck up. Leave him alone.

“But you _did_ do those things!” Jean explodes. “You did them! You can’t just fucking — you can’t just exonerate yourself on my behalf! You did them, deal with it! Deal with me!”

An older woman walking by in a fur coat looks askance at them both as she overhears this.

VISUAL CALCULUS: This must look funny as shit — two cops in RCM cloaks having a heated lovers' quarrel on the benches of a fountain in an art museum, one of them red-faced in fury and the other looking like hell, with a faded black eye.

SAVOIR FAIRE: Looks like some kind of domestic situation. Someone call the cops! Oh, wait, they’re already here.

“I wouldn’t do those things again if I could go back,” Harry says. “And I’m apologizing to you. Jean. Jean, look at me. Fucking look at me. _I’m sorry._ ”

Jean doesn’t look at him; his eyes are glassy and his jaw is tight. “You have told me you’re sorry a hundred times,” he says. “A thousand times. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t care. I only want you to change.”

“But I have changed, and you won’t believe me that I have.”

“Because you’ve ‘changed’ before! It never lasts! It never, ever lasts!”

“Then why are you still here?” Harry exclaims, running out of patience. “Why are you my partner, still? Why did you let me come back to the task force? Why are you…” He lowers his voice. _“Effing_ me? Why any of this?”

Jean’s breaths are even shallower, now. He leans down, his elbows on his knees, his head hanging low. “I don’t know,” he says, his voice a low rumble. “I really don’t know. I can’t let you go, I don’t even know who I am without you. I don’t know what the fuck my life is without you in it. Okay?”

“But I make you miserable,” Harry says.

“It’s always been my hope that one day you would stop doing that.”

ENCYCLOPEDIA: _Amour fou._

“Maybe the day is here,” Harry says. “I can’t do it if you don’t believe in me, though. I need people who believe in me.”

“You have _Kim_ ,” Jean says pointedly.

“A support system can’t just be Kim,” Harry says. “First of all, I don’t even know where he is right now. Second of all, he has way better boundaries with me than you do, which is probably why I don’t know where he is.”

Jean laughs a pained laugh.

EMPATHY: Part of the reason he’s put up with you for so long is that you make him laugh. You’ve always made him laugh — are always _trying_ to make him laugh, and he loves that about you.

ESPRIT DE CORPS: He tries to make you laugh, too, it’s just you’ve forgotten so many of your inside jokes with him that you’re making this difficult. It’s like trying to talk to someone who forgot your shared language.

Harry nudges Jean’s shoulder with his own. “I wanted to take you on a nice date,” he says. “I’m trying to prove something to you, here. Will you let me do that?”

“You’re the one who opened the wound, Harry,” Jean says, looking at him. His expression has softened some. “You asked.”

“I know I did. I need to know… I just want to know what to avoid, so I don’t get bad again.” Harry’s quiet for a moment. “I don’t want to make you sad, though.” He rises to his feet and extends his hand to Jean, pulling him up. “So, what do you want to look at? What art do you like?”

Jean looks like he wants to make fun of this very earnest question, but appears to stop himself just in time. “I like big things,” he says.

“Big things?”

“Giant paintings... tapestries. I like those.”

“Alright,” Harry says with a bracing smile. “Let’s go look at some giant tapestries.”

/

Harry is mostly quiet for the rest of their time in the museum; he’s too busy looking at art to talk. They look at Franconigerian paintings three times as tall as they are that depict historically significant councils and clashes of the royal court; massive Semenese tapestries that tell visual stories of life exploding forth from the pale; paintings of the sprawling tundras of Katla, Graadian sculptures of military figures, war criminals with swords.

Sometimes Jean will point out an aspect of a piece of art and give Harry a brief history lesson on it, but mostly he’s quiet, too. Harry gets the impression that he’s not as well-read as Kim is, though they’re both curious and inquisitive by nature. Jean seems more interested in individual people than in dates or context.

When their brains are full, they get lunch at the pristine, bustling cafe in the basement, then head out of the museum into the bright afternoon. It’s a lovely day, and the sun is much warmer now than it was earlier. Harry feels content. His headache has abated.

They take the path behind the museum down to the banks of the Esperance, where people are picnicking and children are playing, and without saying anything to each other, they pick out a patch of soft grass and sit down in it.

Jean takes off his cloak and then his jacket, tossing them both into a crumpled pile beside him and rolling up the sleeves of his dress shirt before lying back in the grass, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. Harry follows suit and lies down beside him, gazing up at the blue sky. The leafy branches of the trees overhead dance in the edges of his vision.

“I might fall asleep,” Harry murmurs.

“Go ahead,” Jean says.

“Okay.” He’s quiet. “I wish I could kiss you right now.”

“Hmm,” Jean says, with a smile in his voice. “We would never live it down at work if we got hate crimed in Le Jardin.”

Harry reaches down for Jean’s hand and takes it in his, drawing mindless patterns in the center of his calloused palm.

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: The hands of a working man who lifts weights and does pull-ups.

“Why do you work out so much?” Harry murmurs.

“It makes me feel better.”

“Should I work out with you?”

Jean’s quiet for a moment, then pulls his hand away from Harry’s. “You used to… we used to go to the gym together, the shooting range together...”

“What didn’t we do together?”

“Not much.”

“I could do it again,” Harry says. “Do those things with you again. I’m not going to wake up at six to go running, but I could do other stuff.”

“Okay,” Jean says, then adds warily: “Just don’t, uh… don’t try to fix everything all at once. Take small steps, don’t catapult yourself back off the wagon.”

RHETORIC: He’s speaking from experience; you’ve done that before. Declared yourself sober, a new man, all better. Bought a juicer, cleaned your entire apartment. Then one bad day would send you careening back into oblivion.

ESPRIT DE CORPS: Last time was after you responded to the scene of a child who was caught as an innocent bystander in a gang-related shooting. Her tiny body was riddled with bullets, her wide eyes were fixed and unseeing. The sound of her mother screaming and crying stained your mind like gasoline. That was a Friday, and you drank nonstop that entire weekend.

“Baby steps,” Harry agrees, and closes his eyes, feeling the sun on his face, the breeze coming in off of the river. Around them, people are talking, laughing, children are shrieking as they play. “Jean?”

“Yeah?”

“I would really like to put my dick in you, at some point.”

Jean bursts out laughing.

“What?” Harry says, wounded.

“Nothing, just — is that why you brought me here? All the way out to fucking Le Jardin, just so you can tell me you want to fuck me in the ass?”

“No, this was all unrelated,” Harry says, propping himself up on an elbow in the grass so he can look at Jean, who’s still laughing. “I just thought, you know, it’s a romantic moment, might as well float the concept...”

Jean is now laughing so hard he’s having trouble breathing.

“Okay, so is that a no?”

Jean takes a moment to get himself under control, then says, “No, it’s not a _no_. I mean, not right now, not tonight — it’s a whole production. But sure, if you want.”

ENCYCLOPEDIA: ‘Sure, if you want’ is the worst phrase in human history.

“I don’t want to do it if you don’t want it!” Harry exclaims, and Jean shushes him.

“I’m not saying I don’t want it,” Jean says, glancing around. “Please. Relax. You need to chill out. Like, a lot, about everything.”

Harry narrows his eyes at him. “So you _do_ want me to fuck you in the ass.”

“Not currently, at this present moment,” Jean says. “But there are moments when I want you to fuck me in the ass, yes. I’m sure one of those moments will come around again at some point.”

EMPATHY: Don’t let him fool you with this disinterested act — his heart is beating really fast right now.

“Okay,” Harry says, lying back down. “That’s all I wanted to hear.”

“Great,” Jean says, and he starts laughing again.

/

On Sunday morning, a brutal, unending storm comes in, carried south from Graad by the polar jet stream, sweeping over the towering skyscrapers of La Delta to settle over Jamrock and dump sheet after sheet of rain on them, bending the chestnut trees and flooding the gutters.

Jean is very unhappy about this. As they head over the bridge to the precinct, Harry, who is lacking an umbrella, tries to duck under Jean’s, but Jean nudges him away and says, “You’re too tall, you’re making me get wet. Where’s your umbrella?”

“I don’t have one,” Harry says, hunching as much as he possibly can and walking in small mincing footsteps beside Jean.

“You _had_ one, where did it go?”

“I don’t know,” Harry says, and then a black fog of dread settles over him.

INLAND EMPIRE: Oh, god, it was in your car, wasn’t it? The car that found its eternal resting place in the sea?

Kim is already in the lobby when they get there. He’s not damp, but his jacket is. “Gentlemen,” he greets them.

“Hi,” Jean says, shaking out his closed umbrella onto the mat below their feet, which bears the RCM logo. “Can you help Harry with his IG report about Raul Kortenaer’s death? He doesn’t remember how to do one, and I wasn’t there, so I don’t know how much help I would be.”

“Of course,” Kim says.

“What did you do yesterday?” Harry says, squinting at him in curiosity. “Where were you?”

Kim looks taken aback. “Well,” he says, “I did put a deposit down on an apartment.”

“Which one?” Jean says.

Kim gives him a sheepish smile. “It’s actually the one in your building. It was the nicest one I saw… it has updated appliances, even.”

“Updated appliances?” Jean says, sounding put out. “They haven’t fucking updated _my_ appliances. That’s great, though, you and I can hang out.”

“What about me?” Harry says, feeling wildly left out.

“Like you didn’t sleep at my place the last two nights?” Jean says, in a low tone that no one around them would be able to hear.

“I’m sure we’ll all see a lot of each other,” Kim says, and he starts off toward the bullpen, with the two of them trailing behind him. “Hopefully not too much of each other.”

The station is quieter than it would be on a weekday, but there are still plenty of cops milling around, drinking coffee, talking. Occasionally, a burst of incoherent radio chatter spills into the air. Harry settles into his seat at the terrible, messy desk his old self has left him to deal with, and contemplates just setting it on fire and walking away.

“Here,” Jean says, and from his seat at his own desk, he leans toward Kim and Harry to hand them each a form. “IG incident reports.”

“I need two,” Kim says, then adds in an apologetic tone, “I shot Hoenkloewen and de Paule.”

“Fucking right you did,” Harry says proudly.

Jean produces an extra form and hands it to him. “Take as many as you need,” he says. “The 41st prints these like they’re going out of style, McCoy alone goes through three a week.”

Harry filches a clipboard off of Jean’s desk and lays the form atop it on his lap, turning in his seat so he doesn’t have to deal with the avalanche of paper on his desk. While he’s doing this, Kim pulls out his blue notebook.

The form itself is an endless grid of tiny labeled boxes with OFFICER INCIDENT REPORT in angry black printed at the top. Harry stares at it.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: This blows and is fucking boring. You should definitely get up, walk out, and go get loaded somewhere.

“At what time of the night did we kill people?” Harry says to Kim.

Kim looks over his glasses at him. “The tribunal happened around 22:30,” he says. “I remember I checked my watch when we were walking up the road… when you stopped to make your, uh, bomb.” He taps his notebook. “And, like I said, I made extensive notes after I stabilized you.”

Harry writes the date, which he actually does remember, and the time of 22:30. “Incident type?”

“Fatal use of force,” Kim says. He’s writing as he talks, much faster than Harry is.

“Address?”

“Martinaise North 22.”

“How old was Korty?”

“I have no idea,” Kim says. “Forty-five? You can leave things blank, if you don’t know the answer. The IG won’t bring you up for a disciplinary hearing because you don’t know how old the guy you shot was.”

ENCYCLOPEDIA: You didn’t shoot him, you set him on fire. Come on, Kim, get your shit together.

Harry writes forty-five, and 1.85 meters, and 200 kg. Gray hair, brown eyes, and then that’s it for the man he killed. A brief set of statistics, nothing more.

“How reported?” he says, glancing up at Kim.

Kim hesitated, then says, “Officer initiated.”

Harry ticks that box. “Differential factor?”

“For fuck’s sake, Harry,” Jean interrupts, “were you even _there_? Why is the lieutenant doing all of this for you?”

“I don’t know what differential factor means!” Harry exclaims, looking up.

“Use context clues,” Jean says. “Look at the codes. Was he resistant and hostile? Was he armed? Was he drunk?”

“Yeah, all of those.”

“Okay, so A, B, and E, then.”

Harry circles A, B and E while Kim continues filling out forms in silence.

EMPATHY: He appreciates that Jean interceded on his behalf, although he thinks he was unnecessarily rude to you about it. 

“Could you tell him to stop being so mean to me?” Harry says to Kim.

Kim laughs. “I’m not getting involved,” he says.

“But this is inappropriate workplace behavior, to yell at me. And it undermines my authority.”

“Oh, please!” Jean exclaims.

“This is a police station, detective,” Kim says drily. “There are very few standards for appropriate behavior.”

“What, does this fit those standards?”

Kim restrains another laugh, but his lips quirk up as he does. “Your partner’s simply employing what we refer to in the biz as _tough love_.”

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Tough love — firm, sometimes harsh reactions to someone’s behavior with the intent of bettering them and their life in the long run. Usually used on criminals, addicts, and badly behaved children.

Harry sits with this for a moment. “How does ‘additional narrative’ work?” he says, when he flips the paper over and sees a great white expanse for him to write in.

“As you’d probably expect,” Kim says. “This is where you give your account of what happened.”

Harry’s brain goes blank in a scary way. It’s a polar tundra in there, with wind whistling over vast, empty expanses of ice. “I don’t know how to write about what happened,” he says. “It all happened so fast.”

Kim nods. “Close your eyes,” he says.

Harry does, shutting out the visual input of the bullpen. He can still hear muted, distant conversations, radio chatter, and the metronomic sound of Jean clicking his pen.

“What do you remember?” Kim says.

“We walked up the road toward the Whirling,” Harry says. “We knew what was happening as soon as we saw it… we’d been warned.”

“Okay. And then?”

“We confronted Korty,” Harry says, squeezing his eyes shut harder, trying to conjure the memory of what happened. It slips through his fingers like sand. “We… um…”

Something lands in his lap. He opens his eyes and sees Kim’s blue notebook.

“Use this to refresh your memory,” Kim says, then adds: “If you can read my handwriting.”

VISUAL CALCULUS: Of course you can read his handwriting — it’s perfectly legible, not at all like your insane doctor’s scrawl.

Harry shoots Kim a smile and starts to read his accounting of the tribunal. When he turns the page, he notices a bloody thumbprint on the edge of the paper.

“Is that my blood?” he says.

“Yes,” Kim says. “Sorry.”

“No, don’t be sorry,” Harry says, his voice rising in pitch and wavering for a reason he can’t identify.

He shuts the notebook and busies himself filling in the ADDITIONAL NARRATIVE, ignoring the concerned looks that Kim and Jean are now giving him.

/

At around noon, the three of them finish up and hit the road. When they’re standing in the lobby, shrugging their coats on and preparing themselves to go back out into the monsoon, Harry asks Kim if he wants to hang out, but Kim says something about packing and heads out with a smile and wave.

Harry turns to Jean. “I can’t believe he doesn’t want to hang out with us.”

“Well, he did just hang out with us the other night,” Jean says, struggling with his umbrella. “And he _does_ have to pack, he’s moving. You’re overly sensitive.”

Harry studies Jean for a moment, then says in an undertone, “So, are we a go for me putting it in you tonight?”

Jean choke-laughs. “ _What_?”

“What?”

“Is that how you speak to me?”

“I don’t know,” Harry says, shrugging. “I don’t know how I speak to people.”

“I have plans tonight,” Jean says, meeting Harry’s gaze; his light eyes are dancing. “With Trant and Jude.”

“Can I come?”

“No.”

“What? Why not?”

“Because we’re going to drink,” Jean says. “I want to be able to drink a little bit with my friends, and I can’t bring an alcoholic with me.”

“You could,” Harry counters.

“No, Harry, it wouldn’t be fair to you, you’re like a week sober.”

“Two weeks.”

“There’s barely a difference,” Jean says. He jerks his head toward the door. “Can we go?”

Harry nods, and Jean heads out into the pouring rain, his black umbrella blooming over his head like some strange flower.

/

They go back to Jean’s apartment, where Jean changes and gets ready while Harry lounges on the couch, listening to the radio. When Jean emerges and heads for the front door, Harry gets up to leave, too, but Jean says, “You can stay, I’ll only be gone a few hours.”

“You sure?” Harry says, remaining in an awkward suspension between sitting and standing.

Jean nods. “They both have kids, we don’t party hard,” he says. “And I’ll feel better if I know you’re here, anyway.”

REACTION SPEED: No alcohol in his apartment.

Harry allows himself to fall back onto the couch, wincing as his thigh spasms in pain. “Alright. I’ll be here.”

Jean gives him a once-over. “Order food or something, if you want. There’s twenty reál under the breadbox.”

“Thanks, honey,” Harry says, and blows him a kiss.

Jean coughs out a laugh. “Bye, Harry,” he says, as he pulls the door shut behind him.

As soon as he’s gone, Harry does the chain on his door and then starts snooping around. He opens Jean’s fridge and goes through it, but there’s barely anything in there, and nothing he hasn’t already seen. He shuts the fridge and moves to the cabinets, scanning them.

VISUAL CALCULUS: Plates, bowls, utensils, cleaning implements.

LOGIC: What are you looking for, dude?

INLAND EMPIRE: A memory. A piece of the past. It’s here somewhere.

Harry moves deeper into the apartment. He tosses the bathroom, looking under the sink like he did on his first day back from Martinaise, then heads into the bedroom.

There isn’t much in here. There’s the bed they’ve been sleeping in, a dresser, a bedside table, and a clothes hamper.

Harry goes to the dresser and pulls open the top drawers; the one on the right is Jean’s underwear and sock drawer. He starts pulling things out like a madman, dumping boxers and socks on the floor, and then he finds it: a stack of envelopes full of old letters.

He takes a seat on the bed and begins to go through them, looking for one from himself. Jean has two dozen letters here, some seemingly work-related, some from people who must be friends or past lovers, and a few from family. Harry doesn’t read any of those. He doesn’t want to violate Jean’s privacy, he just wants to know what he used to be like. He wants to hear how he used to write, how he used to sound.

Finally, he finds one from Harrier Du Bois. He sent this to Jean from Sur-la-Clef about seven months ago.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Your affair had just begun, at that point.

“Why was I in Sur-la-Clef?” Harry mutters, pulling the letter free from its envelope.

_Jean-Jean,_

_I’m writing this from the balcony of my hotel room after a long day spent downstairs, sitting in conference rooms and listening to guys from the ICP explain how to be a cop. I am forever in their debt, because until now I thought it was all about shooting people and confiscating grass._

_Sur-la-Clef is beautiful, although it doesn’t look like a place where anyone actually lives. I’m looking out over the city right now, and it looks airbrushed, like a brochure for a university. None of the people who live here seem real, they look like paid actors. It’s like East Revachol but worse._

_I’m writing you a letter because I can’t stop thinking about you. I know it was terrible timing that I did what I did the other night and then left for this conference the next day. I feel like a fucking idiot about it. My whole flight over, I kept thinking about you, and I wanted to call you as soon as soon as shit wrapped up today, but I’m too big a coward to do that. So I’m writing you a letter instead. I’ll probably get back before you even get this. I hope you will give me the benefit of the doubt since interisolary travel really fucks with my head (as you know)._

_I just wanted to say that I meant what I said the other night — you are the only person who understands me. I feel that even more right now. All day today I’ve been wishing you were here with me so we could make fun of these assholes together._

_I really hope I didn’t screw things up between us. If the sex doesn’t work, fine, but I can’t lose you, you know that._

_I get that I was loaded when I did it, and I want to apologize for that. I bottled that shit up for so long that it came out as soon as my guard was low enough. But I’m sober right now (okay... I had two drinks) and I feel the same way now as I did then. I want to touch you so bad. I want to fuck your mouth again. Just thinking about it is driving me crazy. It feels so good to finally be able to admit that._

_I’m going to wrap this letter up before it gets even more incriminating. See you soon._

_XOXO,_

_Your superior officer_

Harry stares at the letter once he finishes it, uncomprehending. Was that really him? It’s his handwriting, and he signed it, but this guy is almost unrecognizable to him.

Even so, the letter itself fills him with a spiky, aching sadness. He carefully puts all of Jean’s letters back into the drawer and piles his boxers and socks on top of them, then shuts it and steps back from the dresser like it’s radioactive.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: You need to drink. You need to drink. _You need to drink_. This sadness will kill you. Booze will save you.

“No,” Harry moans aloud.

INLAND EMPIRE: Why did you go snooping? Why?

Harry goes over to Jean’s hamper and grabs the t-shirt he wore to go running yesterday. He clutches it in his fist and staggers toward the bed, collapsing onto it. He curls up in a ball and brings the t-shirt to his nose and mouth, breathing in deeply, inhaling Jean’s scent. Loneliness zings its way through his body like a fever chill.

“I don’t need to drink,” he mumbles into the fabric of the shirt. “He’s coming back. I’m not alone in the world. I don’t need to drink.”

VOLITION: If you drink, you _will_ be alone in the world, Harry-boy.

/

Harry wakes up a few hours later to the sound of the front door opening. He rolls off the bed and staggers to his feet, then limps into the living room, blinking and rubbing his burning eyes. Outside, rain is still dumping in sheets; he can hear it pounding off the walls and windows.

Jean is back, and clearly tipsy — he keeps dropping his keys and giggling about it. He looks up when he hears Harry, and, smiling, says, “Hi.”

“Hi,” Harry grunts. “Did you have fun?”

Jean shrugs his RCM cloak off and hangs it up by the door. “I did.”

“What did you drink?”

“Wine,” Jean says.

Harry sighs in longing.

“This is why I didn’t bring you,” Jean says, stepping out of his shoes.

VISUAL CALCULUS: They are normal, practical, comfortable shoes. Black, unassuming, shined sometimes but not recently. No heel. Sturdy soles.

LOGIC: Everything about Jean is relatively unassuming, at least in comparison to you.

CONCEPTUALIZATION: He is the peahen to your peacock.

“I went through your stuff and found a letter I wrote you,” Harry blurts out, resting his hands against the back of the couch and leaning over it.

Jean doesn’t even look surprised as he loosens his tie and takes it off, hanging it up on the coat rack by the door. “Did you read it?”

“Yeah. I found others, but I only read that one… I felt like I should be allowed to, because I did write it, even though I don’t, uh, remember doing that.”

Jean nods. “I can’t argue with you there,” he says. “Though an attorney probably could. Was it the one you sent me from that ICP conference?”

“Yeah.”

“It was sentimental of me to save that.”

“No, I’m glad you did,” Harry murmurs, staring down at the couch, squeezing its orange fabric in his hands. “I didn’t realize I used to call you Jean-Jean before, too.”

“You didn’t?” Jean comes over to him on tipsy sock feet, perching on the back of the couch a few feet away, his arms folded over his chest. His voice is even rougher than usual. “I thought you were doing that because you remembered.”

Harry shakes his head. “Must have just been muscle memory, or habit.”

“Yeah. You always thought that was funny. There’s an actor, Jean Béguey, everyone calls him Jean-Jean… I think that’s where you got it. Or you were riffing on Jean-Heron. I don’t know, I never asked you.” He pauses. “Maybe now we’ll never know.”

Harry glances up at him. “Are you mad I went through your letters?”

“No,” Jean says. The look on his face is relaxed and open, almost affectionate. “I would be curious too, if I were you. Jude and Trant and I were talking about this, actually… how scary it would be to wake up and not remember anything. I think I hadn’t really felt the appropriate sympathy for you, before. Too busy being angry.”

“Yeah.” Harry waves his hand in dismissal. “It’s fine. I’m pretty used to it, by now… and things are coming back.” He inhales hard. “I didn’t like the letter.”

“No?”

“No. That guy, the old me… I don’t think I like him very much.”

“That’s interesting,” Jean says, “because I found that letter sweet, and funny. And honest.”

“Did you really?” Harry says.

“Yes, Harry.” He’s smiling now, his eyes twinkling. “Why do you think I kept it? Like I said before… you’re feeling guilty about all the wrong things.”

Harry’s quiet. “I think I’m jealous of him,” he says.

“Jealous,” Jean repeats. “Of... yourself.”

“Yeah. I don’t like that he was fucking you, and intimate with you, and best friends with you.”

“But that’s _you_ ,” Jean says.

“But I don’t remember any of it,” Harry says, feeling suddenly tearful, his face hot. “I don’t get any of the good shit. I only have, like, three nice memories of Dora, and they’re just, you know, _fragments_. He got all the good shit, and then he left, and left me behind to pick up the pieces and get yelled at by everyone.”

“Harry,” Jean says, his voice soft. He comes over to him, taking Harry by the biceps and turning him, his strong fingers pressing gently into Harry’s skin. He makes Harry sit against the back of the couch, and then nuzzles up against him, standing between his parted legs. “You can still have good shit.”

“Can I?” Harry murmurs, kissing Jean on the mouth.

“Yes. Yes.”

EMPATHY: This is the most that Jean has been able to relate to you in a long time.

They kiss for a while, then. Jean tastes like wine, which Harry tries not to notice. He focuses on other things; the smell of cigarettes that lingers in Jean’s hair, the softness of his lips, the shivers he gets when Jean’s goatee scrapes his chin and throat.

They burrow more deeply into each other’s space, their warm chests pressed together, their crotches pressed together. Harry gets a hard-on that pokes Jean’s hipbone; he can feel Jean’s own hard-on against his thigh.

“Can I fuck you?” he finally whispers in Jean’s ear, before kissing it.

Jean shivers in his arms. Harry fully expects him to say no, but he replies in a low, thickly-accented purr, “I want you to fuck me so hard I can’t walk straight tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Harry says, his eyelids fluttering as an overwhelming pulse of pleasure shoots through his gut and into his dick.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Jackpot!

“Well, let’s go do that right now,” Harry says weakly, trying not to let his legs buckle underneath him. “Before you change your mind.”

Jean laughs and kisses his cheek. “I’m not going to change my mind, don’t worry.”

Harry lets Jean take him by the hand and pull him along to the bedroom. Jean shuts the door hard behind them, and Harry immediately starts disrobing, flinging his shirt and tie on the floor and undoing his belt. He penguin-waddles to the bed with his pants around his knees, then collapses atop it and kicks them off along with his briefs, before rolling onto his back.

“All yours,” Harry says, gesturing toward his erect penis.

Jean glances at him as he opens the top drawer of the bedside table. “Oh, you expect me to be on top? That’s so like you.”

“You don’t _have_ to be on top, I can move. What are you doing?”

Jean tosses a tube of lube onto the bed, then a small, amber bottle of liquid. He shuts the drawer and starts undressing; Harry ogles eyefuls of his body as he does.

“What’s in the bottle?” Harry says, while staring at his hard dick.

“Alkyl nitrite,” Jean says.

“What’s it do?”

“Makes you horny and loosens your asshole.”

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Tell me more, sir.

“Can I have some?” Harry says.

“No,” Jean says, peeling his socks off and tossing them across the room. “I’m only using it for the asshole aspect. You don’t need to discover a new drug right now.”

He picks the bottle up off of the bed and uncaps it, then closes one nostril with a finger and sniffs the bottle hard with the other. “Fuck,” he says, blinking and shaking his head.

“C’mere,” Harry says.

Jean caps the bottle and sets it back down, then kneels on the bed and leans toward Harry. Harry sits up and grabs him by the thigh, lightning-quick, yanking Jean bodily toward him. He rolls him onto his back with a rough motion, then pins Jean underneath him on the bed. Jean stares up at him, looking pleased, his irises glowing while his pupils within them grow massive.

“Who’s an old piece of shit now?” Harry pants. “Uh… what do I do first?”

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: You have to finger him, so you don’t murder him with the stupendous girth of your loins.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: For ‘stupendous,’ read ‘average.’

Jean picks up the lube and squeezes a generous amount into Harry’s palm. Harry works it over his fingers, and Jean shifts underneath him, shoving a pillow under his lower back and raising one leg to drape over Harry’s back.

“You’re flexible,” Harry says, with a shiver of arousal.

“Yes, I should be in the circus,” Jean murmurs.

Harry starts to finger him. Luckily, this, he remembers, at least on a sensory/muscular level. Jean inhales sharply, tipping his head up and back, his eyelids falling.

“C’mere,” he breathes, and pulls Harry closer so their sweaty chests are flush. Harry nuzzles Jean’s throat, kissing the spot where his pulse flutters, listening to his soft whines of discomfort as he works more fingers into him. “Harry…”

“Stop,” Harry says, growing stern, “or I am going to come on your leg.”

Jean laughs and wriggles underneath him, using the leg that’s hooked around Harry to exert pressure on his lower back that brings his pelvis south and presses his dick flush with Jean’s abdominals. Harry momentarily resents how young and fit Jean is; he feels like he’s crumbling into dust, in comparison.

ENDURANCE: Don’t die of a heart attack.

“If I die on top of you,” Harry says, fingering Jean harder, “please put clothes on me before you call anyone. Don’t let them take me to the morgue naked with a stiffy.”

“I promise,” Jean says, laughing breathily.

“Does this feel good?”

“Yeah. Well…” Jean reaches down, taking his hand, and changes the angle slightly, then grabs Harry by the wrist and starts to move his hand for him. “That, do that.”

AUTHORITY: Fucking hell, you need _assistance_ fingerbanging the guy? This is a nightmare. You can’t even screw someone in the ass authoritatively.

Harry leans in and kisses Jean’s neck while they work in tandem to finger him, their chests pressed together, each other’s sweat mingling in the hair and their breathing syncing up. Jean’s body is so hot he feels feverish; he warms Harry like a summer sun.

“Okay,” Jean murmurs against Harry’s mouth.

“Okay?”

“Fuck me now, I’m ready.”

Harry’s so overwhelmed by this that he has to close his eyes and take a moment. He feels like his body is full of electricity. He falls quiet, and all he can hear is rain pounding off the bedroom windows and Jean’s ragged breathing underneath him.

He eases his fingers from Jean and takes his dick in his hand, sliding it into him to replace them. Immediately, sensory memories explode in his brain, and he feels swaddled in familiarity.

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: Yes, this is fucking. You remember fucking. You remember the infinite pleasure of hot, wet musculature clutching around your dick.

Jean grabs at him as he slides in, wrapping a hand around the back of Harry’s neck like a backwards murder attempt. He lets out a soft exhale that’s broken in the middle, and Harry’s cock twitches and throbs inside him. He wants to fuck his way through Jean like a knife through wet tissue paper.

He starts to move into him, working his hips in a familiar rhythm, and Jean moans a raspy “Harry” at him.

“If you don’t knock that off I swear I’m going to come,” Harry warns him.

“Fuck you, jerk me off first at least,” Jean murmurs.

Harry acquiesces, reaching down to stroke his dick. He buries himself in Jean like he’s a grave, nuzzling deeply into his neck, mashing their torsos together so that he’s barely able to move his hand to masturbate him, only managing quick twitches with his fingers.

The rhythm of his hips slows down, and soon the fucking becomes very lazy and tender lovemaking, the two of them kissing deeply and moaning each other’s names into each other’s mouths.

Jean comes before Harry does, crying out like this pleasure is unbearable, his thigh muscles tensing against Harry’s skin and one of his hands falling open-palmed against the bed. Harry tries to fuck him a little harder, then, because he can feel himself running out of energy, and he wants there to be a good finale.

When he comes, it shatters the earth as usual, suffusing his ravaged brain with white-hot pleasure and waking up parts of it that were lost or defunct, unearthing faint memories that he can only see the edges of. Harry lies atop Jean in perfect ecstasy for a few moments before the orgasm fades, and he remembers that the wonderful feeling is always temporary, always leaving. Then melancholy rises back in him like the tide.

They lie there for a while, just breathing. Jean is stroking Harry’s hair.

“Sorry,” Harry says. “I think you’ll probably be able to walk straight tomorrow.”

Jean coughs out a laugh. “It’s okay,” he says.

“We’re covered in come,” Harry notes.

“You want to shower?”

“Yes please.”

In the shower, they kiss some more while they swab ejaculate off of each other with a rough washcloth. Jean keeps coming into Harry’s space like he wants to be held, so once Harry’s satisfied with the cleaning job he’s done on himself, he wraps his arms around Jean and holds him. They stand like that for a while under the low-pressure spray of hot water, clinging to each other.

“What are we?” Harry murmurs to him. “What are we doing?”

Jean’s quiet for a while. “I don’t know,” he says, before kissing the swoop of Harry’s collarbone.

“Okay.”

/

The two of them remain quiet for the rest of the night. Jean falls asleep as soon as they retire to bed for the night, apparently lulled into contentment by wine and a good fuck. Harry lies there awake for at least another hour, stroking Jean’s hair, watching shadows move on the ceiling and listening to sirens wail.

The next morning, Harry’s gunshot wound is painful, aching in an exquisitely tender way that makes him want to stick his fingers inside of it, like it’s a socket where a tooth once was. He resists this urge, instead asking Jean if he can rub some numbing cream on it.

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: It no longer needs to be bandaged; the wound is dry enough to not have to be protected from anything. The muscle has knitted itself with granulation tissue and is now a healthy, shiny whitish-pink, though there’s still a divot where the bullet tore into you.

Harry can’t help staring at that divot with squeamish disgust while Jean slathers the whole thing in ointment.

“Are you actually grossed out by this?” Jean says to him. “You’ve seen so much worse. We’ve seen suicides that were cleaved in half by trains.”

“ _Half_? In which direction, half?”

“Horizontal, dummy,” Jean says, and pats his leg. “You’ll be fine. Sorry I overexerted you last night. I wasn’t thinking about your leg when I bitched about not wanting to be on top.”

“It’s fine,” Harry says.

“If there’s a next time,” Jean says, “I’ll just sit in your lap.”

Harry feels a twinge of arousal at the idea of this. “Do we have to go to work, now?”

“Yes, it’s Monday.”

RHETORIC: ‘Monday.’ Horrible word. Monstrous word.

It’s no longer raining, but the morning is thick and grey, and Jamrock is damp like a wrung-out washcloth. A heavy fog has rolled in over the city, blurring the corners of everything. It makes Harry think of the pale in a way he doesn’t like. Ever since he read that letter from himself, he’s been getting intrusive flashes of how interisolary travel felt: the sensation of his brain being crushed by a 2-dimensional plane stuffed with other people’s souls.

Harry follows Jean mindlessly as he heads into the station, saying hi to people and stopping with Jules to check for messages. They leave their cloaks at their desks and then head upstairs into one of the conference rooms, where Kim and Trant are waiting.

Kim is standing in his typical parade rest a few feet behind Trant, who’s writing with a squeaky marker on a massive white board that’s covered in print-outs. Arrows and neat writing connect the print-outs in an intricate web.

REACTION SPEED: The web of a lunatic. Trant is some sort of a lunatic.

As if reading Harry’s mind, Jean says aloud, “Trant, you serial killer.”

Trant laughs and turns to them, capping his pen. “Good morning.”

Harry scans the board, squinting at it. Much of what’s there has to do with the drug trafficking patterns of the various local gangs, and Trant and Kim seem to be trying to work out where Ruby fits in. To that end, a fairly passable police sketch of Ruby sits in the center-left of the board, with arrows arcing outward from it.

“Did _you_ draw that?” Harry says to Kim, pointing at it.

Kim’s gaze follows his finger. “Oh, yeah,” he says.

“It’s good.”

The lieutenant looks pleased. “Thanks. I sketch a little.”

“This actually does fill in some blanks about the drug trade in Jamrock,” Jean says, his eyes roving the board, taking everything in at once. “I’m surprised we never looked to Martinaise, but you don’t know what you don’t know, I guess.”

“Trant and I were discussing that, actually,” Kim says. “We’ve started working up a psychological profile of Ruby herself, and —”

His sentence is interrupted by the door bursting open. They all turn and see Judit.

“Hi,” she says, waving. They wave back. “Sorry to interrupt. Um, Harry and Jean… you’re needed at a scene.”

AUTHORITY: A patrol officer calls you ‘Harry’? That’s weird. Even Kim mostly refuses to call you ‘Harry.’

COMPOSURE: It’s not because she’s breaking rank, or anything, she’s just a normal person who’s speaking to you like you’re a fellow normal person. Women are less fervent adherents to weird military-style hierarchies, also.

“What scene?” Jean says.

RHETORIC: His tone is so much lighter when he talks to her than it is when he talks to you, what the hell?

“It happened around five this morning,” she says, tucking her hair behind her ear. “A bike courier was fatally struck a few blocks from the station. Chad and I responded, we thought it was a normal hit-and-run, but when we came back to run the victim’s identification, we saw he’s a witness in a gang case.”

“What’s the case?” Harry says.

“A Mazda triple homicide in Couron,” Judit says. “He was the only eyewitness.”

“Fucking shit,” Jean says.

Judit nods. “The triple was one of McCoy’s cases,” she says, “but he doesn’t want the hit-and-run. He said he doesn’t like to ‘turn over old dirt’.”

Jean barely restrains a massive eyeroll. “Fine,” he says, then to Harry: “Let’s go.”

“What if I want to stay here?” Harry says, leery of going back out in the fog to look at a murder.

“Then you get overruled by your partner and dragged along with him anyway,” Jean says.

Harry looks to Kim, who shoots him a knowing smile.

REACTION SPEED: Kim is not getting involved. Stop trying to get him involved. It’s never going to happen, he’s way too smart for that shit.

“We were already getting along fine just the two of us,” Trant says, all cheerful. “You go on. Hey, it might even be related. Judit, if you’re free, come join us, we’re just spitballing theories.”

“Sure,” Judit says, heading deeper into the conference room as Jean and Harry head out.

“McCoy,” Jean mutters, as they tromp down the stairs from the catwalk and into the bullpen, returning to their desks to grab their still-damp cloaks. “Fucking shits in my palm at eight on a Monday. Typical.”

Harry likes it when Jean is mad at someone who isn’t him. “Yeah, fuck that guy,” he agrees.

He follows Jean down to street level and back out into the fog, and they head down the sidewalk toward the sound of sirens a few blocks away. Despite Harry’s longer stride, they match each other's pace, because Jean walks at a good clip, and Harry is still battling a limp.

They hear the scene before they see it — radio chatter, loud voices, the sound of flashbulbs. When they round the corner, there it is. White and blue-striped police tape stretches around the perimeter, taking up most of the road. Inside of the tape, Harry can see a bunch of forensics guys walking around in their white plastic suits, taking photos of the scene with instant cameras. Chad Tillbrook is standing near an MC, talking quietly to another uniformed officer who Harry doesn’t recognize. Outside of the tape are rubberneckers, reporters, neighbors, civilians staring and whispering to each other.

PERCEPTION: And then there’s the body, which you are ignoring, for some reason, even though you can see his mangled form out of the corner of your eye.

VOLITION: Let him ignore the body until he can’t any longer.

Harry and Jean duck under the tape, ignoring the reporters who shout questions at them as they do. Jean heads for Chad, and Harry follows him, his boot heels clicking on the wet pavement.

“Tillbrook, Barbieri,” Jean says in greeting. Chad and the other uniformed cop nod in acknowledgement. “Minot briefed us — anything else we should know?”

“Not really,” Sebastian says. “We IDed the make and model of the MC based off eyewitness statements, put an APB out, have forensics working on the tire marks to see if we can ID the make on those. They’re about to take the body to processing, but we told them you wanted to take a look first.”

“Thanks,” Jean says. “Gloves?”

Chad hands Jean two pairs of latex gloves. Jean hands one pair to Harry and starts pulling on the other.

“What else did the eyewitnesses say?” Jean says.

“Not much,” Chad says. “Car came screaming around the corner, hit the vic, tore off. No one got a good look at the driver or the plates. People ran over to help him, but he died instantly. I mean, look at him.”

A creeping dread is growing in Harry, but Jean looks unperturbed. “And he was a bike courier who witnessed a Mazda triple in Couron?”

Sebastian nods. “Name was Quine Albrecht.” He hands Jean an ID card. “He was delivering a subpoena in the building when it happened… this was about four months ago. He was set to testify in two weeks.”

Jean examines the card. “Anything else?”

“He’s married, his wife is next of kin, but we haven’t been able to get ahold of her yet. He’s from Villalobos originally. And that’s all we got.”

“Okay,” Jean says. “Thanks, gentlemen. You can head back to the station, we have it from here.”

“Thanks, Vic,” Chad says. “Good luck.”

Sebastian gives them an ironic little salute as they head off, ducking under the tape. Harry fumbles to put his gloves on; his hands are starting to sweat.

VOLITION: Start breathing through your mouth now, and don’t stop until you’re out of here. The smell of gore on pavement is hard to forget.

Jean turns and starts walking toward the body where it’s lying in the center of the road. Harry stares at the white rectangle in the center of his departing back.

ESPRIT DE CORPS: Jean doesn’t mean to ignore your unease, it’s just he would never expect you to be uneasy about this. The two of you have responded to about a hundred homicides together, over the years. This is routine.

Harry starts following Jean, moving slowly through the thick morning air. When he reaches the body, Jean squats beside it, lacing his fingers together and balancing on the balls of his feet.

EMPATHY: He’s in a little pain from last night, but he’s pretending he’s not.

Harry bends a knee and finally lowers his gaze to the body.

It’s horrific — exactly as horrific as he was afraid of. The bike courier’s eyes are wide open, fixed, staring up at nothing, reflecting the gray expanse of the sky. He’s bloody all over, a mess of gore, organs outside of him. One of his legs is bent absurdly under him like a doll. He’s bleeding profusely from a head wound. Harry wants to fall to his knees sobbing, just looking at this wreck of what was once a human being. A warped, shattered bicycle lies a few feet behind him on the pavement.

Jean starts touching the body, going through the pockets of his blood-soaked jacket.

“Didn’t they already do that?” Harry chokes out.

Without looking at him, Jean murmurs, “Beat cops often miss little details…” He pulls a bloody piece of paper free of one of the pockets and glances at it, then shakes his head. “Just a receipt,” he says, but picks up an evidence bag from the stack lying beside the body and slides it inside, sealing it back up.

“You think he knew who killed him?” Harry says.

“I think it’s possible,” Jean says. “Usually gangs don’t kill like this, they like to send a message. He’d probably been successfully thwarting them for a while, if they had to resort to mowing him down in the road. And he would have known he was in danger. No one testifies against the Mazdas, la Madre, any of them. It’s suicidal.”

“You think they would have threatened him?”

Jean nods. “I think it’s entirely possible. We need to get his phone logs, talk to his people —”

From behind them, they hear a wail that makes Harry’s neck hair stand on end. He recognizes it in the marrow of his bones: the sound of grief. A woman screaming in grief.

INLAND EMPIRE: The dead man’s wife.

“Hand me that tarp,” Jean says, pointing past Harry, to his left. When Harry doesn’t react right away, Jean snaps his fingers and shoots him a murderous look.

Harry quickly swivels and grabs the tarp, tossing it to him. Jean covers the body carefully, making sure to tuck his twisted leg underneath to hide it. Harry turns and looks over at the crowd gathered behind the tape — they’re all looking behind them at a woman who’s approaching, weeping and distraught.

“His wife,” Harry murmurs.

Jean nods, snapping his bloody gloves off and stuffing them into his pocket. “I’m sure. Come with me, we need to speak with her.”

“Us? Why?”

“ _Why_? We’re the officers on scene, and her husband is dead, Harry, what do you mean _why_?”

“Just — _me_? Am I cleared to do this kind of thing?” Harry says, glancing back at Jean, who’s staring at him in dismay.

“ _Yes_ ,” Jean says. “You did it in Martinaise, didn’t you?”

Harry nods. “As long as you believe I can,” he says.

Jean softens. “Yes,” he says again, and rises to his feet, beckoning Harry. Harry gets up too, and follows him.

The walk over to the tape is dreamlike. Time is moving in slow motion. Harry never wants to arrive in front of this woman, yet arrive they do. She’s breaking down, sobbing, clinging to the tape as if it could possibly hold her up.

“Miss?” Jean says. His voice is soft again, like it was when he spoke to Judit earlier.

PERCEPTION: Nicer to women than he is to men.

The woman shakes her head, still sobbing. “Is it him?” she chokes out.

Jean lifts the tape over her head and takes her by the elbow, pulling her a few steps inside so she’s no longer trapped in a gaggle of gawking rubberneckers and reporters.

“Who’s ‘him’?” Harry says to her, searching her face.

She makes a choking sound. “Is it Quine?”

Jean pulls the ID card from his jacket pocket and shows it to her. “Is this the man you mean?”

She gathers herself long enough to look at it, her jaw trembling, her eyes full of tears, then nods.

“Okay,” Jean says. “Let’s go sit down for a moment.”

He leads her over to the curb, to a spot where a forensics van blocks the tarp-covered body from view. Before she sits, Harry removes his jacket and spreads it over the curb for her, because it’s still very damp out. Jean shoots him an appreciative look.

The woman sits down on Harry’s jacket, shaking violently. Jean bends down in front of her and says, his voice soft, “What’s your name, miss?”

“Sarah Albrecht,” she manages to say.

“Is your husband Quine Albrecht? Is this his identification?”

“Y-yes.”

Jean nods. “We found this card on a bike courier who was fatally struck in a hit and run a few hours ago.”

“No, no,” she wails.

Jean rests a hand on her forearm, and she grabs onto him, clinging to him. “I’m so sorry,” he says.

“No, no. God, no,” she weeps. “Please… is there some kind of mistake? There has to be some kind of mistake.”

Her grief is so potent that Harry is blown back by it. His stomach is roiling with nausea.

“We haven’t positively identified the body,” Jean says. “He needs to be taken to the medical examiner, first.”

The woman collapses, then, weeping into Jean’s shoulder. He remains knelt there, holding her arm, like a knight swearing fealty. For a second, his own eyes glow with tears — then he blinks, and like magic, they’re gone.

Harry can’t take it anymore, at that point. He doesn’t want to vomit in front of Sarah, so he hurries down the sidewalk and into the alley, falling to his knees beside a dumpster and emptying his stomach. He hasn’t eaten anything yet today, so it’s just coffee and bile that sting on their way out. He stays there for a minute or so, dizzied, his face flushed. Then he leans his head against the cool metal of the dumpster and feels a little better.

He hears footsteps behind him after a while, and turns to face the source of them. It’s Jean, shadowed against the bright gray sky.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Jean whispers.

“Uh, vomiting,” Harry says.

“Yeah, I can see that, why are you vomiting?”

Harry shrugs, and a shiver wracks him as he does. He gets to his feet, brushing gravel and grime off the knees of his pants. “Dead body. Crying woman.”

“We’re cops,” Jean says flatly.

“I’m new to this,” Harry says. “I know I’m not actually new to this — but I feel — it’s _like_ I’m new to this, okay?”

“Harry, look — the most veteran cops throw up sometimes, I understand, but I can’t have you melting down and disappearing on me while we’re working a scene.”

Harry swallows down the taste of bile, feeling overwhelmed and dizzied. “I don’t know if I can do this,” he says. “This? Every day? This is what we do?”

“Yes,” Jean says. “This is what we do.”

“It’s horrible,” he says. His throat grows thick with tears.

AUTHORITY: You’re going to cry? _Now_ , you’re going to cry?

Jean moves closer to him, touching him on the arm. “Harry,” he says, his voice urgent, “listen to me… I understand, I do, but this would happen anyway. Do you get that? This is happening all the time, everywhere, every single day, you can’t stop it from happening. If you turn away, avert your gaze, it will all still happen. Don’t kid yourself. But what we do… we can help. We can make it a little better. We can put something right, every once in a while.”

“Did I believe in that?” Harry says, his voice wavering.

“Of course you believed in that,” Jean spits. “You believe in it so much you made _me_ believe in it. Now where have you gone? You’ve vanished, you’ve let me upholding what you used to believe — it isn’t fair, Harry. Come back. Please, just come back.”

He, too, is grief-stricken. The entire world is grief-stricken, Harry thinks. It’s constant, it hangs over them all like fog.

“I’m here,” Harry says. “I’m here… I just needed a moment.”

“Good,” Jean says, looking relieved. “I handed Albrecht off to a social worker so she could be briefed about counseling options, but we need to question her as soon as we can. She may have known about any threats on her husband’s life. Are you okay to join me?”

Harry nods, swallowing again — swallowing tears this time. “Yes,” he grinds out. “I’m okay.”

Jean’s eyes are wide, their grey reflecting the sky the same way the dead man’s did. “Okay,” he says, and turns on his heel to leave the alley.

Harry follows him.


End file.
